eighties...

the eighties is proving to be to this-time (i.e. 2000s + 2010/2011) what the sixties was to the actual eighties, i.e. near-inexhaustible resource. still a fair few sub-zones of the decade unexplored and unexploited

in the last year or so genre-mining/reactivation-invocation moved decisively into goth / industrial / EBM / Cold Wave

e.g.

manifesto (masquerading as Resident Advisor interview) from Blackest Ever Black's Kiran Sande. plus mix. both terrific.

Kid Shirt coins great name - Work - for what at the time we'd probably have called "second-wave avant-funk"

here's something i wrote about the zone at the time and something touching on it from a few years ago.

at the time Hula Chakk Portion Control 400 Blows Sweatbox etc did seem to trail in the wake of Cabs/Skidoo/ACR... but one of the side effects of the topsy-turvy-ifcation of pop-time induced by the net etc is that music is no longer trapped in sequentiality: you can rehear this stuff as if it was its own entity, rather than (historical truth) something that came "after" and was judged harshly or at least greeted with a shrug. Equally you could stick with historical-sequence mindset and reconsider it as a bridge-phase between postpunk and UK house/techno, given that many of the second-wave avant-F/"Work" figures (Tony Thorpe, FON crew)would pop up soon as players in the early Nineties ravezone

(Chakk was actually my very first Melody Maker cover story: they'd signed to MCA resulting in music that unsuccessfully attempted to add a mersh-gloss to Cabs-y "thug funk", something CV themselves had attempted with only slightly more success)

Kek's "Work" chimes nicely with this minimal techno outfit now veering into 80s industrial/Red Mecca-ish zones:

Perc’s Wicker and Steel (album hearable in its entirety here) + Guardian piece on Perc here



Reminds me a bit of Test Dept circa





And hey here’s an earlier Perc track actually called ‘Work Harder’