Experimental Products

A document recovered from the margins. Experimental Products - Oxide 1982-94 is exactly what its title announces: a body of archived oxide, demos and live recordings spanning twelve years of activity by two of minimal synth's most stubbornly self-reliant figures.

Mark Wilde and Michael Gross formed Experimental Products in 1982 in northern Delaware, operating heavily out of Philadelphia's fringe club circuit. Self-described as a garage band that swapped guitars for synthesizers and a drum machine, they pressed their debut LP, Prototype, in a run of 300 copies that year - a record so obscure it disappeared almost immediately, only to resurface two decades later as one of the most sought-after artifacts of American minimal synth, fetching upward of $500 a copy at auction. Their 1984 12" EP Glowing in the Dark - three tracks, 2000 copies on Short Circuit Records - became something else entirely: a 1985 dance club breakthrough, reaching number 12 in the midwest, the sole independent in the RockPool 100 for that year. By 1987 the group had expanded to four members and released a second EP, Experiment!, before dissolving into the decade's close.

Oxide 1982-94 is the third Vinyl On Demand installment dedicated to the band's legacy, following the reissue of Prototype and the anthology Tracks to Glow in the Dark. It works differently from those - less a reissue than an excavation. Synthesizer tracks drawn from demos and live performances, covering a span from the group's founding year through to 1994, they document the full breadth of Experimental Products' range: the cold, minimal pulse of their early recordings, the harsher electro-wave momentum of their mid-period, and the more diffuse, searching material that emerged after the band's official dissolution.