Category Archives: The Vault
The Vault: Man Parrish
The Vault: The classics of Electronic Music. The influential and the groundbreaking. The pioneering and the music we grew up on…
Yeah, yeah, I know. electronic rumors in ‘actually writing one of their supposedly ‘regular’ columns’ shocker!
Well, it was time to dust off The Vault and feature an artist I have been meaning to write about ever since I came up with The Vault idea.
Electro legend Man Parrish.
Not just instrumental in shaping the sound of Electro Hip-Hop, but influential in most electronic music to this day, Manuel ‘Manny’ Parrish took Hip-Hop to the Discos of New York and took Disco to the streets. Coming out of the Studio54 scene to become one of the original, if not the first, producer/artists in electronic music, Man used costume, theatrics and make–up, to put on an unforgettable live show that also had the side effect of concealing his identity (a Caucasian producer in an African American dominated Hip-Hop scene).
Man Parrish’s place in the history of Electro, ElectroPop and Club music is undeniable. Maybe even more than Arthur Baker and Afrika Bambaataa, Man brought electro Hip-Hop to the masses, even the UK charts, and along with the likes of Baker & Bambaata, Cybotron, and Mantronix shaped an electronic club sound that Hip-Hop would soon forsake but SynthPop, House and Techno would utilise as a base to build upon.
Just listen to these tracks off the self titled début album and the classic single ‘Boogie Down (Bronx)’, they still sound fresh today and the beats, lead lines and vocoders could easily be from any contemporary tune featured on electronic rumors. Most European readers will probably be most familiar with Manny’s work from his Italo/hi-RG collaboration with Man 2 Man from 1986.
Personally, I think 1984’s ‘Boogie Down (Bronx)’ was one of the first synthesizer riffs that got stuck in may head and I have always loved Man Parrish’s combination of the aggressive Funk of early Electro Hip-Hop and the riffs and lead lines of SynthPop. Oh, and the man wields a mean vocoder too!
♫ Man Parrish – Hip Hop BeBop (Don’t Stop) (zShare) (MediaFire)
♫ Man Parrish – Man Made (zShare) (MediaFire)
♫ Man Parrish – Six Simple Synthesizers (zShare) (MediaFire)
♫ Man Parrish – Heatstroke (zShare) (MediaFire)
♫ Man Parrish (Feat. Freeze Force) – Boogie Down (Bronx) (zShare) (MediaFire)
♫ Man 2 Man Meets Man Parrish – Male Stripper (zShare) (MediaFire)
Man Parrish is currently signed to Norman Cook’s Southern Fried Records.
The Vault: Creaking open to bring you some Halloween Ministry!
The Vault: The classics of Electronic Music. The influential and the groundbreaking. The pioneering and the music we grew up on…
Happy Halloween readers!
Just a quick one today, but we couldn’t really let Halloween slip by without posting this gem could we?
You may know who Ministry are; black dreads, long beards, Metal guitars, shouty vocals, skulls on mic stands etc…, basically a walking Metal cliché. Things weren’t always the case!
1981 to 1984 Ministry were actually a really good SynthPop band, probably one of the best the US has ever produced Releasing a handful of 12”s on Wax Trax! Records culminating with the album ‘With Sympathy’ on Arista Records, Al Jourgensen (above; later to sport black dreads, a cowboy hat and a heroin addiction) produced some fantastic, emotional and groove laden New Wave music. With 1986’s ‘Twitch’ album Ministry discovered Industrial music, and it was still all good. ‘Twitch’ is a well crafted, harsh, electronic record. Even 1998’s ‘Land Of Rape And Honey’ has some good tracks on it, although it’s standing at the top of (if not actually sliding down) the slippery slope of mediocre rock music.
Ministry’s career, from1989 onwards, is just a decent into stereotypical Heavy Metal with any originality or innovation stripped from the mix. In a laughable attempt to sound ‘hard’ Al Jourgensen has disowned his early recordings as “…an abortion”.
Such a pity…such talent gone to waste…
Anyway, it’s the ‘season of the witch’ and all that, so get your listening gear ‘round Ministry’s classic ‘Everyday (Is Halloween)’, a brilliant poppy disco track, and imagine the band that could have been…
♫ Ministry – Everyday (Is Halloween) (zShare) (MediaFire)
Ministry’s early works are still available on CD:
The Vault: Cybotron
The Vault: The classics of Electronic Music. The influential and the groundbreaking. The pioneering and the music we grew up on…
It’s 1986, this blogger is 11 years old. Up until this point my musical world has consisted of chart music and SynthPop (also chart music) inherited from my older brother. Then me and my mates discovered Graffiti, Breakdancing and Electro.
At the weekend we’d go down the underpass with a Hitachi boom box, a piece of old lino and a couple of spraycans for some poppin’, lockin’ and tagging. We’d clumsily practice our windmills and caterpillars to a soundtrack of mixtapes that came from who knows where; traded amongst older kids and eventually passed down to us.
One of these tapes changed my life.
It was a cassette of a pirate radio show, I didn’t know (and never found out) any more about it but amongst the likes of The Kartoon Krew and Mantronix was a track that blew my young mind.
That song, although I wouldn’t find out what it was called or who it was by until years later, was ‘R-9’ by Cybotron.
Everything I has ever heard up until that moment was, for want of a better word, poppy. Even the Electro Hip-Hop we were listening to was upbeat, party music and the darkest of SynthPop was still a verse-chorus-verse-chorus pop tune. ‘R-9’ was strange and dark with washes of eerie synthetic tones and an infectious Electro Funk bassline.
I Loved it!
Here was something that I hadn’t heard on the radio, hadn’t been played to me by someone else. I had discovered a band, and song, no one else around me knew about (admittedly, neither did I really!) and I enthused about it to anyone who would listen. And, so, my mind was opened up to the world of music out there that exists out there beyond the Top 40 and peer’s tastes.
I never stopped seeking out new music.
Cybotron was an early project from Detroit Techno pioneer Juan Atkins, with Richard “3070″ Davis. Formed in 1980, taking influences from American Funk, European synthesizer music and English SynthPop, Cybotron became incredibly influential themselves. Juan Arkins, along with Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson, is generally credited with originating Techno.
Cybotron were an experimental inspiration to many electronic musicians that you could break boundaries, yet keep it on the dancefloor.
Hear for yourself why:
♫ Cybotron – R-9 (zShare) (MediaFire)
♫ Cybotron – Cosmic Cars (zShare) (MediaFire)
♫ Cybotron – Techno City (zShare) (MediaFire)
♫ Cybotron – Alleys Of Your Mind (zShare) (MediaFire)
♫ Cybotron – Clear (zShare) (MediaFire)
♫ Cybotron – Enter (zShare) (MediaFire)
Cybotron didn’t really release that much, re-releases can still be picked up, as can a couple of Greatest Hits albums,
The Vault: Cabaret Voltaire
The Vault: The classics of Electronic Music. The influential and the groundbreaking. The pioneering and the music we grew up on…
I somehow always knew that electronic rumors’ first The Vault article was going to be about Cabaret Voltaire, it had to be really, not only are they highly influential to me, personally, but to every strain of electronic music.
From the early use of synthesizers and tape loops with punk ascetics to pioneering the early dance scene (via being emblazoned on Ferris Buelller’s bedroom wall!), Cabaret Voltaire have done it all…first!
Richard H. Kirk and Stephen Mallinder (initially along with Chris Watson) formed the Cabs in 1973 in Sheffield (ground zero for all things synth) as a way to experiment with sound creation and processing. Strongly influenced by the Dada art movement, they quickly became associated with the burgeoning Industrial scene.
The group’s first (proper) releases were on the legendary Rough Trade Records label and from the early, experimental noise-pop works to the 808 and 303 laden later records Kirk and Mallinder were always ahead of the pack, and, indeed, Kirk was instrumental in the early life of legendary experimental electronic stable Warp Records.
One of the first artists to really embrace using non-musical instruments or found sounds to create music, Cabaret Voltaire influenced all things Experimental & IDM, SynthPop & New Wave and later Bleep House & Dub heavy Techno.
Electronic music just wouldn’t be the same without Cabaret Voltaire.
Here we have a sampler of the Cab’s back catalogue, some obvious, some not. From 1979’s ‘Mix up’, ‘No Escape’ and from the seminal ‘Red Mecca’ (1981), ‘Spread The Virus’. Moving into a more ElectroPoppy area ‘Crackdown’ from ‘The Crackdown’ in 1983 and, probably Cabaret Voltaire’s biggest hit, 1984’s ‘Sensoria’ from the album ‘Micro-Phonies’. ‘I Want You’ comes from their last Rough Trade album ‘The Covenant, The Sword, And The Arm Of The Lord’ (1985) and showing it’s Bleep House influences ‘No Resistance’ is taken from 1991’s ‘Body And Soul’
♫ Cabaret Voltaire – No Escape (zShare) (MediaFire)
♫ Cabaret Voltaire – Spread The Virus (zShare) (MediaFire)
♫ Cabaret Voltaire – Crackdown (zShare) (MediaFire)
♫ Cabaret Voltaire – Sensoria (zShare) (MediaFire)
♫ Cabaret Voltaire – I Want You (zShare) (MediaFire)
♫ Cabaret Voltaire – No Resistance (zShare) (MediaFire)
Whether you’re into SynthPop or Experimental, Dub or Dance, Indie or Industrial, Cabaret Voltaire helped shape the music you love. Much of their back catalogue is still available including a few best of compilations:
Site News: Regular columns
So, here at electronic rumors we’ve decided to introduce three regular (well, I say “regular”…I probably mean “semi-regular”…or “when I get ‘round to it”) columns.
Basically, this it to allow us to write about music that inspires us outside of the confines of the latest-promo.-releases/unsigned-band-discoveries/bleeding-edge-reMixes business that makes up the bulk of this blog (and most other music blogs).
This is what we have come up with:
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The classics of Electronic Music. The influential and the groundbreaking The pioneering and the music we grew up on…
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A chance to enthuse about music from the last few years that pre-dates electronic rumors, this stuff has probably already been blogged to death years ago, but we need a chance to get how much we love it off our chests. We already love it, you already know and love it…and are probably bored of it, but we’re going to blog about it anyway…
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While electronic rumors isn’t strictly an Electro-House blog, we do cover a lot of Electro-House that crosses over in to our realm. So many good club tunes and reMixes surface each week we can’t (and wouldn’t) cover them all, so this is a round up of some of the best from the week that we didn’t have time to dedicate individual posts to…
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Like I said, probably more semi-regular than regular but they should make for some interesting posts…I hope.
While I’m here I’d just like to thank everyone who comes and reads the site or subscribes to our RSS feed, our readership seems to be doubling every week and growing a lot faster than I had expected. Feel free to email with and comments or suggestions.
Take it easy.
