Still by Cosmicity

Cosmicity is one of the early synthpop "bands" of the post-crash, internet driven phase of the genre, having been around since sometime in the early 90s at least (the first CD, The Vision has an original 1994 release date, and there's apparently unreleased material out there older than that.)  Cosmicity also isn't really a "band" since it's pretty much just one guy, Mark Nicholas.

Cosmicity was also one of the earliest signees to the A Different Drum label, and makes a number of appearances on early compilations and whatnot released by Todd.  This, of course, meant that they have one of the longest pedigrees of post-popular synthpop out there, and that I've been following them almost that long--since the late 1990s, at least.  I've got almost all of the Cosmicity catalog; I picked up Isabella on CD early on, and the re-released double CD of The Vision and The Moment.  Later, when I first had an emusic account, I got The Binary Language of Love, Pure, Renaissance and Escape Pod for Two, as well as a bunch of remixes and whatnot.  More recently, I bought Resynthesized and Ascii Cupcake as well as a couple more remixes as Amazon.com mp3 downloads.  Perhaps fittingly, most of my Cosmicity collection has been picked up as digital downloads.  I recently converted everything I could to mp3, attempting to make a CD-R of mp3s that had the entire collection.  However... it wouldn't all fit.  I managed to leave The Vision and The Moment off, and then only had to cut a single song or two from the rest of the collection, so I did that, and over the last week or so, I listened to the entire Cosmicity catalog (almost) in chronological order.  Then, I started it over again (my car is queued up near the beginning of The Moment again as we speak.  Since I couldn't fit them on the CD-R, I just brought them along in old-fashioned CD format.)

I don't have Syn or Forgive Me My Syns, nor do I have the two CDs or so released under the Mark Nicholas (instead of Cosmicity) name--presumably because they were different in style.  In fact, I had thought he had abandoned the Cosmicity name completely, but recently I just discovered the existance of Ascii Cupcake which was released in 2010; an EP of Cosmicity material.  His output did slow considerably in the last decade, though--although his marriage, becoming a father, and dabbling under a different "brand name" in a different style of music makes it seem much slower than it really is.

An important part of the Cosmicity experience, shown a little in the video below, is the cult of personality that Mark has developed around himself.  All of his songs are quite personal; most even autobiographical, at least somewhat.  And if you read his liner notes, comments on his webpage, and elsewhere, one gets the impression that Mark is really "out there" socially--really sharing almost to the point of TMI.  He even comes across as kinda primadonna or diva-like; but somehow instead of that coming across as unmanly and annoying, he manages to make it somewhat self-deprecating and even charming.  The only exception to this is that there's a fairly strong undercurrent of whininess and petulance about the reaction from fans, his label, and others to Syn and what it represented; both a stylistic departure from the Cosmicity norm, as well as an attempt to be dark, edgy, and cuss a lot.  This apparently didn't go over well, and the musical style has never appealed to me either (I heard some samples of Syn earlier on an earlier iteration of his website (I believe) and The Moment also previews a lot of the sound and approach on some of its material.)  Luckily, he's mostly left that side alone, or at least walled it off away from the Cosmicity name and released it under his own name and as a different brand.

My own interactions, scant as they have been, with Mark, have always been quite pleasant, though.  I sent him a couple of emails when a couple of the tracks from my emusic download of Escape Pod For Two were messed up, but I had cancelled my account with emusic and moved on after getting them (and before they could charge my credit card for another month of membership.)  Although he chided my somewhat for not going to emusic with the problem, he did, in fact, help a brutha out.

Speaking broadly, I'd say my favorite Cosmicity projects are Isabella and Escape Pod For Two.  Getting the two-disc version of Escape Pod is especially desireable, as it features a number of remixes that are really, really good--including the Syrian remix of "Sedgewick", the Raindancer remix of "Departure" and the T.O.Y. remix of "Tinnitus."  Isabella also has some excellent tracks, and some of the remixes are top notch.  Some of them are a bit harder to find, though--the Bongo Club version of "Visionary" and the Red Sweater mix of "Your Beautiful Lie" are hard to find now--although the Extended and David's Groove 100 Mix respectively of each is on Resynthesized.

Pure and Renaissance are a tier slightly lower than those two, full of really good songs and including some of my favorite songs.  Pure also has singles/remixes readily available through Amazon; the DJ Ram remix of "Defeat" is especially recommended.

The Vision and The Moment are considered by Mark himself (it appears) as somewhat crude, unexperienced and primitive, but actually there's a lot of good material on both, especially if you get the 2-disc re-release that has a number of extra tracks and remixes on it.  The Binary Language of Love for whatever reason I could take or leave; it's not actively bad by any means, but none of the material on it really speaks to me.  And Ascii Cupcake is probably too early for me to have any comment on yet--I've only listened to the whole thing through two or three times so far.  So far, though, I think it's really good.

Another curious aside; the Resynthesized remix double CD is a great bargain, even if much of the first half of it is Binary Language material.  Curiously, on Amazon at least, the tracks are kinda messed up.  The first one of the disc-2 material is just a bunch of snaps and crackles, while the second song is actually the first song mislabeled.  In fact, the entire second disc worth of songs is mislabeled and "off" by one.  The good news is that this means you actually have almost all of the tracks, even if you need to go and relabel the tags and filenames.  The bad news is that you're missing one--the Secret Mix of "Awake."  For now, at least, however, you can buy it as an actual CD for only $3 from A Different Drum.  While it's not advertised as such, that's probably a "while supplies last" kind of offer, so get it while you can.  Certainly it's the best way to pick it up.  Although iTunes and CDbaby might not have the same issue that Amazon does; I can't tell from any personal experience.

Russian Radio by Red Flag

Lately I've been reviewing some of my more "obscure" 80s CDs, and by "obscure" I mean merely that they don't belong to one of the early New Wave "supergroups" that put out tons of tracks during the decade and became emblematic of some of the early synthpop sound.  This mostly only excludes Depeche Mode, Erasure, New Order, OMD and the Pet Shop Boys (although I've been listening to some of their stuff too.)  Most of these bands were relatively short-lived, putting out only a few CDs in total--or even only one.  Some of them had some modest success, charting in the US on the Dance charts with a track or two, if not the pop charts.  Most of them also came along near the end of the era.  So, I just finished up with Seven Red Seven, and I'll probably also do a brief revisit of Cause & Effect and Camouflage too, but I'm inevitably led to Red Flag when I get in this mood.

I discovered, while on a retrospective of this blog, that my earlier Red Flag post probably needs to be edited since the video that I embedded has been taken down due to the user's account being terminated.  But I also want to post some other Red Flag material, including the first of their songs to catch my ear, "Russian Radio."

While Red Flag is always insistent that their name comes from a surfer warner symbol (they lived for some time in the San Diego area) their iconography, and the fact that one of their first successful songs was, in fact, called "Russian Radio", and the fact that the Cold War was still a fact of life in 1988, it makes that claim just a little bit hard to believe, and I admit that I'm skeptical that they didn't in fact milk the late-era Soviet iconography for attention in both their name, their song titles, and their image in general.

Anyway, without further ado, "Russian Radio."  This is a long version from their 12", which I won as a door prize at a dance once in 1988 or 1989.

Damned Don't Cry by Visage

Woah!  I almost forgot I had this blog!  After listening to a bunch of more modern synthpop and futurepop type stuff, I stumbled back into the arms of some of my older 80s music recently, though--right now I have in my car Book of Love's Book of Love, Anything Box's Peace, Pet Shop Boys' Actually and Erasure's Wonderland... and I intend to pack those away when I'm done and get a few more; the next Erasure CD (maybe I'll go through most of their 80s and 90s catalog, even, before I quit!), some Real Life, maybe some Alphaville, and maybe some other "junior" synthpop groups, like Seven Red Seven or Cause & Effect.  That's got me thinking historically about synthpop, which reminded me that I had a blog.

From my perspective, at least, synthpop has gone through four distinct (and fairly broad) stages since it's debut in the late 70s--not counting the very earliest years when it was still struggling to find a place.  Certainly by the time The Human League released Dare in 1981, synthpop was mainstream successful (at least in Britain, with a slightly more subdued yet comparable reaction in America.  In some other markets--notably Germany--it was even more mainstream successful.)  Despite that, synthpop remained a somewhat "fringe" element of mainstream music; more influencing it than cranking out hit after hit in it's own right.  In the US, we didn't yet use the label synthpop; I called this stuff New Wave and had to then qualify it as "synthesizer New Wave" to distinguish it from other proto-Alternative groups, like The Church, or The Alarm or REM, or pre-Joshua Tree U2, or whatever--which were also lumped into New Wave.  This first phase--emergence--is characterized by steadily growing popularity and mainstreamization of synthpop type sounds and conventions, as well as a steadily higher peaking chart positions, and gradually more and more bands operating in the arena.  However, it was still dominated by a mere handful of guys who were the "elder statesmen" if you will of synthpop--Depeche Mode, Erasure, Pet Shop Boys, OMD, etc.  Near the end of the Emergence phase, a number of smaller "copy-cat" bands started putting out stuff too, to slightly lesser acclaim, but which had modest commercial success--guys like Anything Box, T-4-2, Cause & Effect, Seven Red Seven, Red Flag, Camouflage, etc.

Following the "synthpop crash" of the early 90s, major labels dropped most of their synthpop bands, with the exception of the very top tier folks--who even then saw a massive down-surge in popularity and sales.  This is the period I call underground--a nascent Internet connected a few distributors like A Different Drum, who managed to gather synthpop from independent labels around the world, as well as release a few items itself as a label.  In this phase, the so-called "elder statesmen" of the past either chugged along or released items that abandoned their synthpop sound.  For a little while, some of the lower tier guys from the past became "elder statesmen" of this phase.  By and large, the scene was very indie, fairly underground, online, and dominated by a handful of labels and their output.  In the US in particular, A Different Drum as a label (not to mention as a store/distribution point) was an important leader, and whatever A Different Drum released was bound to get plenty of attention. 

Some new rising stars from this era include De/Vision, Mesh, Iris, Cosmicity, and more.  Eventually, as the Internet became itself more mainstream, and digital music distribution became more commonplace, synthpop emerged a bit from this underground obscurity and entered two new phases--which kind of overlap with each other.  First, there's increasing diversification and independence of the modern synthpop scene.  As it merges with other electronic genres, producing narrowly defined subgenres like futurepop (which later migrates into an even more synthpop like sound over time), electroclash, and more, a number of bands come to surprising prominence, and they are mostly new bands, unrelated to the earlier phases.  There also comes to be a great proliferation of bands; right now (since this phase is still ongoing) we are really spoiled for choice when it comes to synthpop.  There are tons of new guys to discover, and there's no longer any need to really dig back into 80s back catalogs to find nifty stuff to listen to.

Not that you wouldn't want to anyway for other reasons--but  you don't have to.  The other interesting phase that's also going on right now is the curious mainstream faddishness of overtly retro synthpop.  Artists like Little Boots, La Roux, Owl City, Hurts, The Presets, and even Lady freakin' Gaga are all putting out mainstream hits that are quite clearly synthpop.

Wherever it goes from here, it seems unlikely that another descent into underground obscurity seems eminent.  The mainstream faddishness may indeed prove to be a short-lived fad (or it may not; in many ways, synthpop sensibilities have so thoroughly infused pop music overall that at least one reviewer has claimed that it's already "won" and taken over the world permanently) but the very diverse and thriving not-quite-mainstream scene seems unlikely to go away soon.

But even so, there's a recognition amongst many of these artists that they're building on the groundwork laid in the 80s by synthpop pioneers, and it's not unusual for many of them to do cover versions (sometimes only live, as a tribute to the fans) of 80s synthpop favorites.  Just recently, in fact, I picked up some Mark Oh' and The Flash remakes of some Visage classics (actually, I've had their "Fade to Grey" covers for some time, but I just got "The Damned Don't Cry."  Vocals by Marcus Fellechner of Rename.)  And while it's a really pretty cool cover, the original is still... well, it's the original.  One of my favorite 80s synthpop songs of all time, in fact.  It's haunting, melodic, and danceable; it's got everything you want a good synthpop song to do.

Starsign by Apoptygma Berzerk

Back in this post, I gave a history of sorts of the futurepop movement, and cited a number of artists who operated in that sphere.  I haven't, however, revisted them, which is a shame.  The albums that most got me into the futurepop scene were VNV Nation's Praise the Fallen and Apoptygma Berzerk's Welcome to Earth and The Apocalyptic Manifesto (although that's a compilation of older stuff that sounds a bit more traditional Front 242 style EBM, frankly.)

For today, here's "Starsign" by APB.

Gapul remixes (italo disco)

Because I've been listening to them in the car lately, I've had italo disco on my mind for a while now.  The history of italo disco is somewhat unusual.  For the uninitiated, here's a brief capsule review:

Everyone's familiar with disco, of course.  Disco was a big hit in the 70s, and a bit into the 80s throughout most of western culture.  However, in the US and to a slightly lesser extent in the UK, there was a major backlash against disco, and it came to be viewed very negatively by about 1980 or so, including Bee Gees record burning sessions, and all kinds of other promotional events, including the infamous "day that disco died" when nearly a hundred thousand disco anti-fans showed up at "Disco Demolition Night" in Chicago.

Of course, disco didn't die in much of Europe; in fact, it continued to evolve into numerous forms.  Importantly, it lost much of its funk patina, and became a much more recognizably European, dance music form of music.  Although I used to take umbrage, during my pretentious younger years, at hearing music critics of the time refer to songs by Depeche Mode or Yaz as "disco" songs, quite frankly, that's pretty much what they were.  Disco evolved into electronic dance music, gradually.

As part of this evolution of disco into more modern forms of music, such as Eurodance, came the sideline called italo disco.  Italo disco wasn't necessarily all that different from other forms of disco in the early 80s, and its genesis was specifically rather prosaic and even banal rather than artistic.  Specifically, the exchange rate between the US dollar and the Italian lira made importing of American music very expensive, and sales plummeted, even though demand remained strong for new music.  Local record companies met this demand by having local DJs, producers and other not-quite musicians whip up quick and dirty dance tracks.  Many of these artists were disposable (Den Harrow was actually a model who lipped synced in videos, while three different vocalists actually sang and many artists produced a remarkable variety of tracks under several names.)  In fact, italo disco became, in a sense, like punk for electronic music--the first "garage band" type of electronic music that was made quick, cheap, and by anyone with a drum machine and a synthesizer.

The vocals were treated more like a another instrument--lyrics were usually in English, but the grammar was often atrocious, the lyrics frequently nonsensical, and they were sung in such a strong accent that you couldn't be sure what they were saying anyway.  This quick and dirty Italian music, made primarily in the north (curiously, it was often difficult to find in southern Italy) was originally referred to as spaghetti dance, but when German music label ZYX started importing the music as compilations, they coined the term italo disco, and popularized it throughout central and eastern Europe, as well as much of the Spanish speaking world.

Shortly after ZYX starting bringing it to the rest of Europe, "italo" disco started being made by plenty of non-Italians--Sandy Marton was a Croatian, Fancy was German, Desireless was French, Bad Boys Blue were multinational (but mostly British) who formed in Germany, Sandra was German (with a French mother, and she lived on the French border--and relocated to Ibiza anyway), Baltimora was mostly Italian, but had an Irish frontman, and Taffy and Laura Branigan were American.  For instance.  Arguably, some of them aren't really italo disco, but on the other hand, how can you really tell?  I've never seen that anyone's been rigorous about insisting that their italo disco artists all be Italians.  Although curiously, if you don't, then you also run into other problems, i.e., how do you distinguish italo disco from some early Hi-NRG stuff, and other genres that sounded exactly like it?  Other than arguably better lyrics (and certainly better pronunciation of them) how is the majority of the Bobby O output really different than italo disco, for instance?  Laura Branigan isn't often thought of as an italo disco artist, but c'mon--she mostly sang songs that italo disco artists had written; in fact, her hit single "Self Control" was out literally at the same time as genuine italo disco artist (and songwriter) Raf's version of it was also in the charts--although her version "won" the chart wars everywhere except in Italy.  Stuff like Koto could as easily be called space disco (another somewhat obscure genre that actually predated italo disco by a few years) as italo disco, and what do you call stuff like Trans X who actually were native English speakers from Canada?  Although not really considered italo disco proper, that kind of music is also strongly associated with it, and most of the internet radio stations I've seen that play italo disco also play Hi-NRG (as per their mandate) and several other closely related and sonically kind of indistinguishable other genres without bias.  So clearly the exact boundaries of the subgenre are a bit vague.

For me, I consider italo disco to largely be made up of the guys--and their closely related label-mates and whatnot--that I first heard on the Gapul releases in Argentina.  Gapul was also a mixer, and much of what he (she? they?) did was "megamixing"--longish songs made up of portions of italo disco (and occasionally Hi-NRG) tracks.  Apparently, italo disco enjoyed some mainstream success in Argentina and Brazil and elsewhere in the Latin world, although by the time I heard it there, it was already kind of old news.  I picked up a few megamix compilations that had blatantly obviously gratuitously scantily clad women on the covers and often mangled song and artist crediting, which only made my tracking down of the actual songs a bit more difficult to do.  But at the same time, it gave me a strong corpus of songs, at least snippets of which I had heard, that I could track down, and then spread out from there.

Here's Side A of "Lo Mejor de Gapul II"--"The Best of Gapul II."  If you like, I can identify any of the tracks on this megamix properly--although I was only ever marginally interested in "Spaghetti" and I never liked anything Spagna did at all.

We'll Be Together by Sandra

I've said many times that we had an unusual lack of exposure to some European megahits in the US, and the career of German-French artist Sandra is clear evidence of that.  Billed as the European Madonna, Sandra had an impressive string of hits, including nearly two dozen charting singles, and half a dozen charting albums.  However, US success eluded her (or she never pursued it, I'm not sure) and her only brush with fame here is when her husband and producer, Michael Cretu, had her on vocals for the massively successful Enigma single "Sadeness (Part I)"--the Gregorian/techno dreamy single that refers to the Marquis de Sade in Latin and French lyrics.

However, for American audiences looking for some pretty smart electronic 80s pop songs that they missed in the 80s, Sandra's discography is loaded with material to be mined.  From 1985's "(I'll Never Be) Maria Magdalena" to 1992's "Johnny Wanna Live" when Sandra took a hiatus to raise her twin boys (a move from which her career never recovered, despite several attempted come-backs) there's plenty of great songs to discover.  My favorite, though, is "We'll Be Together"--one of the few in which Sandra herself shares co-writing credit.  Here, check it out:

Guardian Angel by Alphaville

I only have one Alphaville song on this blog, and the video I linked is now gone.  So, you can't listen to any Alphaville!  That's not right.

The prior post I made was for "Forever Young", their major claim to fame.  Perhaps a too easy choice.  I've actually got quite a bit of Alphaville material, and I think a lot of it is really good.  Some of it is, in fact, quite a bit better than "Forever Young" which suffers a bit from over-exposure.

Alphaville is one of those bands that continued on after the "synthpop crash" of the early 90s.  Although they were never big hitsters to begin with, their incarnation during the 90s was marked by being even further underground.  I bought a German import in about 1997 of Salvation.  It was, about three or four years later, released domestically for less money and with bonus tracks.  Grr.

Anyway, an interesting thing about Alphaville, or at least that album, is that the more "old fashioned" songs, including especially "Guardian Angel" and "Control" are quite a bit better than the more "modern" sounding ones, like "Monkey in the Moon" or "Wishful Thinking" work, but not as well.  In general, Salvation is considered a back to roots album, but relative to what, exactly, I wonder (since I never picked up Breathtaking Blue or Prostitute; the albums that came out between Afternoons in Utopia and Salvation.  To me, most of the album feels more then-current techno/club focused rather than back-to-roots synthpop.)