Recordings 1980–1981 traces the origins of Those Little Aliens / This Little Alien and, with them, a whole micro‑ecosystem of zines and cassette labels - Flowmotion, Image 341 and Un‑Ltd. Abilities - steered by British DIY protagonists Ian Dobson and Gordon Hope. What emerges is not just a set of early synth pieces but the sound of a personal history being rewired by scenes, records and machines. The first jolt came with punk’s arrival in Leeds: the much‑delayed Anarchy Tour finally hit town in December 1976, and a seventeen‑year‑old Dobson threw himself into the chaos, less for the chords than for the ethos that “anybody could do it.” Armed with a cheap electric guitar and then a drum kit, he proved to himself that, yes, anyone could make a racket - “BADLY!” as he would later recall - and that this badness was, in its way, a licence.
As punk’s 1‑2‑3 hardened into formula or was swept up by majors hunting “the next big thing,” the drum kit was sold and the guitar left to gather dust. The second jolt arrived in early 1978 in a small “ma and pa” record shop, in the form of a plainish white sleeve hiding Throbbing Gristle’s The Second Annual Report. That album quietly detonated Dobson’s remaining assumptions about what music should be. The famous punk slogan - “This is a chord, this is another, this is a third. Now form a band” - suddenly seemed beside the point. If TG could turn noise, tape damage and non‑musical sound into a charged work, then perhaps those “wrong” noises his guitar made weren’t so wrong after all. The path from punk to post‑industrial DIY, from three‑chord fury to homespun electronics, opened almost overnight.
The third component was technological: the arrival of affordable mono‑ and duophonic synths that no longer filled a room. The tracks collected on Recordings 1980–1981 are steeped in the textures of the Korg MS‑20, the Octave Cat, the legendary but temperamental EDP Wasp, the Korg SQ‑10 sequencer and the fateful Boss Dr. Rhythm DR‑55 - a drum machine Dobson still professes to hate. Recording was routed through a Tandberg 10×10 stereo machine and a Teac A108 sync cassette deck, feeding a Tensai 2030 amp; three compilation tracks were cut at Colin Potter’s four‑track studio near York, one of the nodal points of the UK cassette underground. The resulting pieces are raw yet oddly precise: flickering sequences, sour‑sweet leads, brittle rhythms and tones that wobble at the edge of malfunction, all stamped with the acoustics of a Harehills bedroom.
None of this would have travelled beyond that room without the fourth element: the humble compact cassette and the informal distribution networks that came with it. Borrowing the spirit of magnitizdat - the underground tape‑copying culture of Soviet dissidents, which even lent its name to Deleted Records’ first compilation - Dobson and peers relied on home duplication and the postal system. For the price of a blank tape and return postage, music could cross borders, find allies, and spawn new collaborations. Around 1980, one such outlay brought an “Aural Assault” tape from Gordon Hope, living only a few miles away. That exchange sparked the partnership at the heart of Those Little Aliens / This Little Alien and the wider Flowmotion/Image 341/Un‑Ltd. Abilities web.
Recordings 1980–1981 captures the moment all these strands knot together. You can hear punk’s ghost in the refusal to wait for permission, Throbbing Gristle’s shock in the embrace of awkward, unpretty sound, and the early synth boom in the gleeful exploration of new machines’ limits. But you also hear something quieter: two people using low‑cost technology and a tape‑trading network to work out how to live, how to connect, and how to turn boredom and frustration into a peculiar, flickering kind of joy. If “the rest is history,” as the notes wryly suggest, this LP is the crucial prologue - the sound of history being improvised with whatever gear, stamps and stubbornness were to hand.
