Consumer Electronics ‎– "Leathersex" (Iphar ‎– Iphar 004) 1982

From Total Sex to Leathersex , featuring future Whitehouse member,Philip Best, as his Consumer Electronics project. Still going strong today,frequently seen across europe playing live with the excellent Sleaford Mods!?
This early C-90 is a raw collection of airwave pollution,courtesy of some maltuned Shortwave radio's, producing a kind of fucked up electronic dance music for those employed in the realms of espionage.
Indeed, contained within these collages are hidden,what we now know to be transmissions for, and from, various spying organisations in the Cold war era. Track 14,for example, has a repeated phrase from Strauss's "Blue Danube" played simply, probably by a member of the Stasi,  on some East German electric guitar. This would have been a call sign for some dodgy operative on the opposite side of the Iron Curtain. This cleverly,or accidentally, segues into a drifting transmission of John Lennon's "Mind Games",floating on a sea of morse code and frequency distortion.
(Check out the earlier post of the "Conet Project:recordings of Numbers Stations" for more similar weirdness from the Cold war era)
I used to listen to the strange music of the  short wave radio for hours, and even used it,as we all did in 1980, for the basis of my own early recordings without access to any conventional instruments. The underclass couldn't afford such luxuries as the Gibson guitars and drum kits one saw in the hands of the local 'Punk' band,who were allegedly 'on the Dole'? The real victims of Britain's decaying social structure and economy could only make do with a cassette recorder and a radio to express themselves.
Here we have a fine example of what one could do outside of the middle class rock ghetto.
(Also check out Philip Johnson's "Radio City" for a similar experiment in radio collage).

Tracklist:

A1	Untitled	18:11
A2	Untitled	2:53
A3	Untitled	1:48
A4	Untitled	2:29
A5	Untitled	0:39
A6	Untitled	3:56
A7	Untitled	1:33
A8	Untitled	11:47
B1	Untitled	4:12
B2	Untitled	14:33
B3	Untitled	7:13
B4	Untitled	8:12
B5	Untitled

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