Electronica 2 (the Avant-gardener mix)

I like various aspects of electronica and always have. Now, I'd like to explore it more, to see if there's something new I can take in. To see if there’s somewhere new it can take me. For me, it will always be a means to an end, a technological support system to convey another feeling. That first feeling was pop - what we grew up with. Or should I say Popcorn? Hot Butter re-recorded this, the first synthpop instrumental hit in 1972 (and covered again by so many since, from Jean Michel Jarre to Herb Alpert and Aphex Twin - and, another techno-dance favourite of mine, Daft Punk, who included elements of it in Around The World). Popcorn emerged around the same time that Brian Eno was wowing us with his synth. I remember that it was the Roxy Music single Pyjamarama (not on any of the LPs) that did it for me. Stuck in a long traffic jam near Llangollen on the A5, on our annual summer pilgrimage to the homeland in Bangor, I recall shouting at my father to switch the station back on half way through the song. I was 13 and very aware that I had just walked my mind into another world and there was no going back. When Kraftwerk emerged with Autobahn in 1974, I knew Bowie and was growing into a world of rock music. This German band represented the acceptable tip of a world of dark and brooding LP covers I'd discovered in W H Smith's record department from bands called Amon Duül, Can, Cluster and Neu! Autobahn was my first experience of ‘found sound’ and the appliance of technology to replicate real-life noise. When Lou Reed produced Metal Machine Music in 1975 (the aural equivalent of James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake), it was nothing to do with electronica and more about his state of mind and bad relationship with his record company. Just as Brian Eno was inventing ambient, with slightly disappointing albums like Another Green World, Kraftwerk were changing their sound, introducing the Minimoog among a whole bank of new technology in a purpose-built studio called Kling Klang. I read about it and wanted to be there. Radio-activity was a superb LP, yet somehow also disappointing, because, title track aside, Kraftwerk had turned away from the approachability of Autobahn. It wasn’t until mid-77 when they re-emerged. I’d gone into Stafford’s only Punk record shop to buy God Save The Queen, but what I heard was Showroom Dummies. I was as knocked out by this as I had been five months earlier by Bowie’s Low – still the best album and electronica of 77, ahead of Marley's Exodus for me. This track, and the accompanying LP, Trans-Europe Express, took electronica into another dimension. It was entirely behind my desire to go around Europe by Interrail, which I finally did in 1981. But Kraftwerk still didn’t truly make it to the mainstream until the Man Machine LP in May 78. By then, we’d had the Donna Summer/Giorgio Moroder breakthrough I mentioned. Yet, as beautiful as Man Machine was, it seemed like a swan-song to me. That Kraftwerk had reached their height and, from now on, would just be an influence for others. And so it proved. While we were all distracted by Power Pop, Mod and Ska revivalists, Kraftwerk paved the way for many of the Post-Punk and New Romantic bands, from the drum machine of Echo and the Bunnymen and Martin Hannett’s production of Joy Division, to the techno-funk of A Certain Ratio on the one hand, to The Associates, Soft Cell and Depeche Mode on the other (the latter, amusingly, claiming to have invented the incorporation of ‘found sound’ into recorded music!!). Rediscovering the catalyst of electronica was a great lifesaver to me when I emerged from two years in the heart of darkness at the end of 1980. As ever, electronica was the way to somewhere else. But the purest sound of electronica will always be Kraftwerk’s to me. OK, they’d topped out and were in Computerworld by 1981. But everything else we hear today is ‘son of’. They’ve toured as recently as 2007/08. The resultant double LP, Minimum-Maximum, has its good points, but it sounds like what it is – a retrospective without the energy and excitement and sense of time and place of the originals. Nevertheless, I was listening to the version of Radio-activity on this album as we entered Hiroshima, by bullet train, in April this year. But I guess the big point I’m making in all this is to say that, for our generation, the baby-boomers, electronica was never an end in itself, but only a means to carry something else that already existed into a new place. I read an interesting article today about Generation Y – the kids born 1978-1994. How, for these people, rather than us or Generation X (1965-77), new media are not a tool, a means to an end. Technology is where they live. The medium is the message. That’s why so much electronica is mediocre, even crap, soulless and unedifying – rather than the exciting, cutting-edge support system, the escape route, it was for us. In our day, so much rock music was also dull, average and lacking. That’s where we lived. So, what electronica needs is its own Punk revolution to weed out the dross, clarify all that has gone before and set a new direction.

markgriffiths@idealconsulting.co.uk