Un Voyage Á Travers Dans Le Paysage Électronique Français, the French subtitle, goes further. French Touch is the first exhibition to celebrate and dig into France’s electronic music heritage: exploring the lineage which laid the ground for the world-wide success of Daft Punk.
There is no band of the Eighties generation who've remained both as big, and as great, as Depeche Mode. Duran Duran? Lightweights. U2? Sunk into self-parody a long time ago. But the boys from Basildon are something else: they've come through all the pressures of fame, addiction, ageing and the rest with their mojo very much intact, sounding like themselves but still writing fresh songs and hitting new emotional spots.
The equipment pictured above is the Powertran 1024, one of the first digital sequencers to hit the market. According to the May 1981 issue of Electronics Today International magazine, which unveiled it to the public, the British-invented “1024 composer is a machine which will repeatedly cause a synthesiser to play a pre-determined series of notes either as short sequence or a large compositions of 1024 notes: i.e. several minutes long.” The article was headlined “Treat your synth to this sequencer/composer.”
Jean-Michel Jarre sometimes doesn’t receive the credit due to him from electronic music buffs. Whereas Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream and Vangelis are held up as ground-breaking innovators of the 1970s, Jarre’s breakthrough 1976 hit "Oxygene IV" is not attributed the same kudos. Perhaps this is because it’s so ridiculously, almost irritatingly catchy. More likely it’s because it propelled its parent album, Oxygene, to multi-million-selling success, making an opulent global star of its creator.
Those who reject Jarre are doing him a disservice. It’s true that from the Eighties onwards his music lost some of its charm, not helped by his gigantic self-aggrandising mega-shows, but Oxygene and its successor, Equinoxe, contain music that’s as much of a template for certain forms of club-affiliated music - notably trance and chill-out - as anything out there. Now, following a couple of feisty, enjoyable albums where he collaborated with a who’s who of electronica, Jarre feels inspired to revisit his initial success with a third volume of Oxygene (a second appeared in 1996).
He retains the stripped-back, wafting instrumental prog-pop vibe of the album’s predecessors, although the main indication it’s an Oxygene album is the endless stoner-friendly wind noise whooshing smeared liberally over everything. There’s nothing as catchy as “Oxygene IV” here. How could there be? But “Oxygene 19” has a crafted, well-sequenced energy, opener “Oxygene 14” contains a twinkling synth motif at its core, and “Oxygene 17” is blissed-out, warm, floaty electro - almost house - that’s well worth a visit. The rest bubbles, pulses and squelches in an enjoyably retro way. Among other formats, Oxygene 3 is being released in triplicate with its predecessors, along with a coffee table book, and it’s easy to imagine that package bought on vinyl by those who might once have liked to have been hippies, decades ago, but got decent jobs instead. They’ll settle down after a decent weekend meal, take out their neatly boxed and hidden hash stash, roll a bifter, whack Oxygene 3 on a turntable recently rescued from the attic, and float off, just as they did 40 years ago. And why not...
Overleaf: listen to Oxygene 3 preview
Johnny Lynch – the artist otherwise known as Pictish Trail – is one of the country’s most intriguing musicians. In 2010, he upped sticks and moved into a caravan on the remote island of Eigg, ensuring every appraisal of his work evermore would refer to him as a “hermit” or a “recluse”.
In the early 2000s, a club called Trash in London, run by DJ Erol Alkan, introduced a wave of indie teenagers to the joys of electronic music, giving them a way into club culture that was all theirs and not beholden to the superstar DJs of the acid house generation. A generation of bands would form directly or indirectly influenced by it – and by the end of the decade, there was a mini wave of bands like Friendly Fires, Late Of The Pier and Wild Beasts, who integrated electronic sound into a rock band format, and brought a bit of disco glitter and androgyny to their image to boot.
Right now we’re at the heart of the silly season. In mid-August no-one releases albums (it’s the same in January). Here at Disc of the Day we’re screaming for something decent to review. But, no, microscopic bands choose to hold their albums back and go head to head with the big names during the pre-Christmas release splurge of September and October. The fact is, as autumn arrives, no-one will cover Blobus & His Black Metal Armada over Britney, Bastille, Ed Sheeran, Haim, Frank Ocean, and the rest.
Familiar words pepper the lead item on the 9am radio news: "Brexit", "Theresa May", "Boris Johnson". Yet the bulletin is delivered in the first language of the 49,000-population Faroe Islands. The self-governing region of Denmark may be a remote cluster of 18 North Atlantic islands, but the Britain-watching contagion has spread to a place which has never been a member of the EU. Denmark is. The Faroes aren't.
Anyone remember the Boobahs? They were the less successful cousins of the Teletubbies, from the same production house. They were puffy, fat, primary-coloured humanoids who bounced endlessly around in bizarre choreographed dance routines. They were psychedelic infantilism incarnate, and very funny.
The Eighties revival in dance music started in earnest with the Electroclash subculture, the first records emerging around 1996. That is to say, the Eighties revival has now lasted twice as long as the actual Eighties itself. And if you think that the heyday of electropop – which is what we generally mean by Eighties sounds – really lasted from about 1978 to 1984, we're talking about a very long revival for a very short “decade”.