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| Pitchfork |
 New Yorker Veronica Vasicka has spent the past five years painstakingly and lovingly building Minimal Wave, a label that specializes in digging up and reissuing electronic DIY music from the late 1970s and 80s. From taking full control of the mastering process to creating packagings that border on the fetishistic, Vasicka has uncovered forgotten forays into independent new wave and synth-pop. Aptly dubbed "minimal wave", the genre's stock characteristics-- ticky-tacky drum machines, analog synthesizers, amateur vocal experimentation, lo-fi production-- seem more relevant than ever now, as a recent rash of DIYers have been toying with unpolished variations of everything from disco to IDM, using little more than a MIDI synth and a microphone. Thankfully, Stones Throw founder Peanut Butter Wolf-- who has devoted a great deal of time spotlighting leftfield niche records himself-- had the good sense to see the "obsessed freak" (his words) in Vasicka. "I always wanted to do an album of this kind of stuff, but I don't want to try and compete with someone like Veronica who does it better than I ever could."For those seeking a substantial once-over, Minimal Wave Tapes, Vol. 1 serves as a great introduction. Most of the releases on the imprint are vinyl only, so PB Wolf combed through Vasicka's vast collection (the two co-produced the project) and hand-picked the group of tracks that show up here. Though Vasicka has released compilations in the past, Tapes is the kind of primer that makes the overwhelming (and for the listener, rather expensive) process of weeding through these acts (hailing from Belgium to Spain to the States and beyond) a little easier. And though there is a commonality at work with the music featured, the genre variations that arise throughout the compilation-- ranging from punk-funk to early techno rumblings to chilly goth textures-- help orient the listener with what they might like to delve deeper into. Almost every track shares an exploratory, homemade feel in either production or the varying degrees of musicianship at work, and though it makes things sound a little lop-sided at times, it's an exciting peek into the experimental, underfunded aspect of a burgeoning trend....full text |
| Residentadvisor |
| Way back before Google and Facebook, a horde of faceless bedroom synth-ghouls, spread across northern Europe, built up a loose cultural network based on home-recording, handmade artwork and tape trading. When synths and drum machines first became commercially available—and affordable—electronic music production spread to the lonely suburbs and industrial neighborhoods outside big cities, and the dissemination of the resulting spectral, aggressive and ethereal tunes was able to allow lonely souls a bit of solace in a shared mixtape. Since then, most of this material has remained hard-to-find and fairly anonymous, and as any cratedigger will tell you, that's all part of the appeal. Says Angular Records' Joe Daniels, "I like the impossible romance you can have with a band when all you've got is a tape with three songs on it all in French, and a single black and white photograph." Thanks to serious heads like Minimal Wave's Veronica Vasicka and Wierd's founder Pieter Schoolwerth, as well as dedicated labels like Stones Throw and Angular, many of these finds appear digitally for the first time on two new compilations entitled The Minimal Wave Tapes Vol. 1 and Cold Waves and Minimal Electronics. The cold/minimal wave world plays out as a kind of a sinister subterranean counterpart to the shiny surface realm of '80s synth-pop, full of dark tunnels populated by Depeche Mode and The Human League's evil twins. They share a sci-fi attitude towards identity, romance and history, a dystopic vision lit by flashing strobes that pierce the smoke and gloom. Their rhythms are gleaned from the churning repetitions of krautrock and disco, their sounds cobbled together from the rough, unpredictable palettes of early UK industrial. The often hand-triggered riffs, oddball singing and lurching rhythms imbue the music with a raw and wobbly soul. It's this sort of living touch that inspires Schoolwerth's particularly polemic vision of the cold wave scene, something he calls "a true movement of humanistic resistance against the vacuous contemporary excesses of modern laptop pop." So: How to tell these two comps apart. In one corner you've got Minimal Wave, born of Vasicka's East Village Radio show. Portents and omens of technological life cast long shadows here. Oppenheimer Analysis' "Radiance," Minimal Wave's first vinyl release, takes the famous Sanskrit citation by the nuclear scientist, "I have become death, destroyer of worlds" as the basis for their catchy Numanesque electro-shuffle. "Way Out of Living" has an uncharacteristic disco groove that suggests Chic played by rusty robots, who show up again on "Flying Turns" to wail in a future-primitive caveman stomp. Then "Game and Performance" takes the potentially inspiring lyric "you can be someone if you grow with me" and sings it over a particularly eerie chord change, suggesting that you might be better off being no one at all....full text |
| Allmusic |
| Dedicated to unearthing obscure wallflower synth pop, Veronica Vasicka’s Minimal Wave label began in 2005 and left an instant impression. Its first release was a 12" featuring four songs pulled from a cassette-only (200 copies) 1982 release by an English duo called Oppenheimer Analysis. By 2008, OA had not only re-formed and performed in a handful of countries, but had one of their reissued tracks, the gorgeous “Devil’s Dancers,” licensed for Clone’s Classic Cuts series. Another thing that happened in 2008: Peanut Butter Wolf fell for the label and subsequently went about compiling this disc, issued on his Stones Throw label, with Vasicka. It follows over 20 Minimal Wave releases and is, for the most part, a sampler. Virtually all of these songs would have been at home on Mute, the spring board of kindred spirits and inspirations like Robert Rental, Depeche Mode, and Fad Gadget. They are just as varied as Mute’s early catalog, ranging from the odd and experimental -- like the scraping and buzzing “Moscú Está Helado,” from Spain’s Esplendor Geométrico, the most-known group here -- to straightforward synth pop, like Oppenheimer Analysis’ “Radiance,” as immediate and fully realized as anything OMD were producing at the time. Belgian trio Linear Movement’s “Way Out of Living,” one of the rawest tracks here, could have been shaped by Arthur Baker into a freestyle classic, while French co-ed duo Deux’s “Game and Performance” snaps and bounces with “The Model”-era Kraftwerk-like precision. In some cases, these artists were not just current but somewhat advanced, most evident in Californian Mark Lane’s “Who’s Really Listening?,” which -- like Section 25’s “Looking from a Hilltop," also released in 1984 -- discreetly packs the acid squiggle that later revolutionized house music. Also check: New Deutsch (International Deejay Gigolo, 2003), Young But So Cold: Underground French Music 1977-1983 (Tigersushi, 2004), BIPPP: French Synth Wave 1979-85 (Born Bad, 2008), Clone Classic Cuts (Clone, 2008), and Typhoon: Portrait of the Electronic Years (Synthonic, 2009)....full text |
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