VOD special sale
Sheet Tape Registered Black 1977-1979
Steve Hitchcock (currently known as Ferrara Brain Pan) began experimenting with music and art in early 1977 as a freshman-year university student in San Diego, where he edited and published five issues of a Neo-Dada mail art 'zine called 'Cabaret Voltaire’. While active in mail art, he corresponded with Genesis P-Orridge and Cosey Funni Tutti of COUM Transmissions and Throbbing Gristle and thereby became involved with the early Industrial music movement. During the years 1977-79, he created thes…
Such Heavy Convinction - Recordings 1981-1983
Tone Set was a Minimal/Synth duo founded by Galen Herod and Greg Horn in Tempe, Arizona- existing from 1981 to 1983. Their early sound was ostensibly synthetic, mixing analog synths and primitive drum machines with snippets of found speech in place of vocals. Their first release, the 1982 cassette "Cal's Ranch" was recorded almost entirely without singing at their home studio 'The Center for Advanced Studies'. That year, Tone Set contributed the track "Out, Out" to Placebo Record's "Amuck…
Recordings 1979-1980
Galen Herod grew up in Phoenix, Arizona and began making electronic music in 1979 with equipment he had no money to buy commercially. His solution was his friend Gary Dukarich, an electronics hobbyist who designed and built oscillators, filters, and sequencers from scratch. Working with these handmade instruments and tape loops in the Phoenix area, Herod produced a series of cassettes that circulated primarily through the distributor Eurock and directly through personal contacts. His early tape …
Waves of Perfect Timbre: Recordings 1982-1987
Leon Lowman is a California-based autodidact musician and painter who traces his interest in synthesizers to a specific moment: hearing ELP's Lucky Man in 1970. At the time he was working for various recording studios and sound companies in the state, and with his first paycheck he made a down payment on an ARP 2600 synthesizer and a Mediamix Joystick for pitch bending, equipment he still used at the time of this reissue. Everything he could spare after that went toward more gear. He wrote much …
Tape-Recordings 1976-1983
Limited edition of 500. Ken Moore (from Baltimore, Maryland) is one of the very early American DIY synthesists and multi-instrumental talents. Moore started to explore electronic music in the mid '70s while working in various (progressive) rock formations. In 1980 he established his own label, Anvil Creations, and in the following four years released approximately 20 tapes of solo and collaborative works he had recorded between 1973 and 1983. His solo work of that era bridges abstract ele…
The First and Second Side of the Mystic Synth
Fockewulf 190 is a Milanese project founded in the early 1980s by keyboardist and conceptual mastermind Victor Life and vocalist Dario Dell'Aere. The band's name references the Second World War fighter aircraft, a provocation typical of an era when Italian post-punk and electronic music often trafficked in militarist imagery as a way of forcing discomfort into the listening experience. Their sound occupies a genuinely singular position: electrodance and Italo disco inflected by an esoteric conce…
The Abstraction Years 1979-81
Adrian Smith of Luton spent three years playing in punk-inflected bands with his brother Derek (Those Nervous Surgeons, Half Nervous) before retreating alone to a bedroom and a synthesizer in 1979. What emerged was something no one in his immediate environment was making: long, atmospheric, analogue pieces built from hand-played sequences, emotionless production, and a palpable air of melancholia. His first two tapes, From the Silent Days and Absolutely Safe, were given only to friends, having n…
The Trumpett Years 1981-1983
Formed in Heiloo, a small town in the Netherlands, in June 1981, Ende Shneafliet began as a three-piece called King Ende Shneafliet before the live drummer was swapped for a drum machine and the project expanded into a fluid five-person studio collective. Over just two years they recorded more than 70 tracks in constantly shifting combinations of two or three members, working out of the Trumpett Sound Studios in Heiloo and the Freakowitz and Einstein Studios on the Wadden island of Texel. All th…
Official Guide To Scottish Minimal Synth 1979-83
Alistair Robertson was a Glasgow-based electronic musician who began making synthesizer music in the late 1970s, running his own tape label Synthetic Tapes from 1980 and releasing material under a succession of project names: DC3, The Written Text, The Klingons, Al Robertson, 100% Man Made Fibre, and Inter City Static. The Klingons' debut cassette Beamed Down by Starship Enterprise (August 1980, recorded at his house in Kirkintilloch on the outskirts of Glasgow) was followed by Analog Digital (1…
Tape Works 1981-85
The finest German Minimal Synth from the early 80s NDW underground, finally given the deluxe treatment it deserves. Jürgen Schweighart, working under the Bowie-inspired moniker V2 Schneider, was one of the true hidden figures of the Neue Deutsche Welle era - not quite punk, not quite goth, but something altogether more singular and strange. Operating out of basements and towers in the south of Germany with his band Blindgänger, Schweighart created a body of work that sits comfortably alongside t…
Operating on specific cues / Early Works 1982-86
Lelu/Lu's were an early to late 80's electronic/synth-based project based around Deni (in the early 80's known as Yo-Yo and nowadays known as Timekode). In 1985 they released a fantastic 12 song tape on Unlikely Records (URT91) called "Operating on Specific Cues" which forms the basis of this 25 track 2 LP compilation release. While the tape is still rather unknown to fans of synth music, the three 7"s released from 1985-87 (on Alain Neffe's Insane Music as well as Possum and R&D Records), with …
Nekropolis 81 Vol.1-4
Peter Frohmader (1958–2022) was born in Munich and grew up listening to Klaus Schulze, Tangerine Dream, and Ash Ra Tempel during the height of the Krautrock revolution. By his early twenties he had established the Nekropolis project and self-released his first LP, Musik aus dem Schattenreich, in 1979, in an edition of 500 copies. Over the following decades he produced an extraordinary and almost unclassifiable body of work from his Nekropolis Studio in Munich: dark ambient compositions informed …
Mutant III
Kevin Lazar is a minimal-synth, electro-acid-techno-pioneer from Chicago who is still active nowadays in the DJ and Electro-culture today as Vekzar. This Lp-Compilation contains his first and highly sought-after 26 minute-Tape "MUTANT 111" from 1982 (recorded late 1981 to Summer 82) as well as his unreleased 4-Track EP "DARK HEART CABARET" intended for release in 1983 plus 3 more previously unreleased Tracks from 1982 and 83. In 1983, Alex Dougal's CLEM (Contact List of Electronic Music) …
C.O.I.T. - A Collection of Isolated Tracks 1981-1988
Founded in Creil, in the Oise département north of Paris, in 1981 by Thierry Damerval on bass and keyboards, Christophe Demarthe on vocals, and Nicolas Demarthe on guitar, Clair Obscur are widely credited with coining the term cold wave, which makes it all the more striking that they vehemently refused to be categorised as gothic or wave, insisting on their own radical unclassifiability from the beginning. Their early shows mixed music with performance art; one notorious concert was staged as a …
A Strange Functional System
More than 30 years ago ‘Bizarre Unit’ released their timeless and highly collected classic single ‘Dancing/Away from the Screaming Car’. Now for the first time ever, Bizarre Unit and VOD-Records have uncovered the lost treasure trove of their surviving recordings. These unique recordings have been digitally transferred, edited and carefully restored from the ¼-Reel-Recordings and Cassettes. Embedded crackling and background noise from the original surviving Acetates have been careful…
Postcards
Gen Ken Montgomery ran a tiny record shop and sound art gallery called Generator in downtown New York — one of the first such spaces in the city — and it was from here that his practice took shape. A self-taught autodidact with no formal training in music or art, Montgomery built his first tape in 1981, Gen Ken and Equipment (150 copies), from cheap synthesizers, toy instruments, household gadgetry, and electric machines: an ice crusher named Icebreaker, an aquarium pump, a refrigerator, a shoe-…
Trees without Leaves
Paul Nova entered the British minimal synth scene in 1980 as part of Bizarre Unit, the project that produced the single Dancing / Away from the Screaming Car (1981), the lone Bizarre Unit 7" that immediately became one of the most sought-after artefacts of the early UK minimal wave movement. In 1982, working alone, he founded his own Exhibit One Records and over the next three years released four vinyl records: two 7"s, a 12", and the LP Trees Without Leaves (1984). All four are now practically …
First Recordings 1978-85 V1.2
John Duncan was born in Wichita, Kansas and arrived in Los Angeles in the mid-1970s, where he became closely associated with the Los Angeles Free Music Society, working with Tom Recchion, Fredrik Nilsen, and Joe Potts. His early practice combined radical performance work, live radio experimentation over KPFK's Close Radio with Paul McCarthy, and an obsessive engagement with shortwave radio that would define his sound for decades. He left the United States for Tokyo in 1982, continued work with p…
Anthology One 1989-91
Anthology One is culled from the first three cassette releases by Voice of Eye; Isolation, Voice of Eye and Resonant Fields / Hot Gypsy Fink Hell, all three Tapes released on thier own Cyclotron Industries Label between 1989-1991 These are the earliest recordings by Voice of Eye.
Voice of Eye can be doubtlessly described as the protagonists and godfathers of the special genre of Ambient-Ritual-Music. Their specialty is "organic sound sculpting": a form of electronic ethnic ambient music th…
Trilogie 1979-1988
The mythology around ADN' Ckrystall is inseparable from the man behind it. Érick Moncollin is the kind of figure that the French underground produced in exceptional concentration during the late 1970s: self-taught, obsessive, wired into the international fringe through tape trades and chance encounters — including a legendary impromptu session with Tim Blake and Vangelis on a prototype Korg MS-20 in a Paris synth shop. His influences range from Heldon and Gong to Gary Numan and Neu!, refracted t…