Ian Boddy ‎– "Options" (Mirage ‎– M607) 1982

'Ian Boddy,composer, sound designer, DiN ambient music label owner & analogue synth aficionado', as it says on his official website; was another member of the British renaissance in electronic music in the 'Berlin School' style as made chart bound by german longhairs, Tangerine Dream.

Most of us would label this as'Ambient/New Age' these days, but its more than that.Especially when the sequencers get going.It has its repetitive synth lines that hit a chord in one's mind and body,and largely leaves the soft synth pads to the background.

I think one of the worst electronic inventions/innovations was the 'Polyphonic Synthesiser', especially when they got cheap.Up there with digital synthesis for awfulness.If music tech only stopped still at Monophonic keyboards that sounded like synthesisers, and drum machines that sounded like drum machines everything would be rosy in the electronic garden.

The temptation for Polyphony enthusiasts was to make terrible 'string section' backings for the otherwise excellent Lead synth lines; removing all breathing space in a recording by drowning it in emulated choirs and other orchestral pretentions.As annoying electronic sounds go, its up there with the Fairlight Orchestral Stab,and the DX7 Brass sound.

Non-Rick Wakeman Polyphonic keyboardists, also had a tendency to just rest their fingers on the plastic ebony and ivory keys and wiggle them about randomly,fed through a reverb unit and echo box, as if they knew what they were doing,which they patently didn't.

"Too many notes spoileth the broth", as the old adage goes; especially if you don't know what notes you're playing.

If you're ok with lush synth pads drowning out the good bits, then this is for you.  

Tracklist:

A1 Corridors 4:43
A2 Karina 3:32
A3 Water On Stone 2:40
A4 Into View 3:18
A5 Skylights 4:05
A6 Silhouette 3:31
A7 Follow 2:58
A8 End Sequence 1:54
B1 Till Quiet Descends (Live 07/11/1981) 13:55
B2 21 Degrees 14:05 (Live 07/11/1981

DOWNLOAD your options HERE!

Rieg ‎– "Music For Wind" (Mirage ‎/ Agitasjon ‎) 1980

Norwegian Bloke (Geir Låstad) in bedroom with synthesiser makes music about the weather......what else would you expect? One has to do something, apart from commit suicide, in those endless dark winter days.
Yep lots of 'white noise' is utilised to make fake wind effects, y'know, the first thing everyone did when they unpacked their new synthesiser......Hey Mom! Listen to this!
Later, we sampled burps into our new samplers and did the same thing; except this time it was for our very unimpressed girlfriends.......although it was very rare for a male into electronic music to actually have a girlfriend.Then when they did eventually find a partner, the synth went into the bin briefly until they were inevitably also 'binned off'for being boring, then came the come-back CD-r.
Geir also disappeared after 1980 only to mysteriously return in 2008 with a....uh-hum(clears throat)....comeback CD-r!.....Is it possible he got a girlfriend in 1981, then when he was divorced by 2008, vented his male menopause by retreating to his misspent youth in the bedroom and his youthful first love?....I think so.

If you hadn't noticed 'Rieg' is Geir spelt backwards.....clever eh?

DOWNLOAD and release some trapped wind HERE!

Mark Shreeve ‎– "Phantom" (Mirage) 1980

Seems 1980 was a prolific year for Mark Shreeve, a year we've already established was the high point of this modern renaissance for art and music that some of us were privileged to have lived through.
It's all finished now of course, with the stragglers having to reinvent the wheel again and again, like landscape painters have had to do for the last 500 years or so; that's the future we have to look towards......the same things but done again,masquerading  as something new.
I suppose this rehashing trend started in the seventies, with stuff like 'the Mod Revival' and the resurrection of 'Ska'.
The UK electronic underground of the early eighties was basically a revival of the German Kosmiche music of the early Seventies, repackaged as DIY Electronica, and set in small town provincial England......well no-one else was doing it were they.Very unfashionable in 1980, so if you wanted to hear music like this then you jolly well had to go and 'Do It Yourself', as the Post Punk manifesto would have stated if it had ever existed.
So, here we get a tape of Electronic Space Symphonies recorded in a bedroom in such an exotic location as the dying English seaside resort of Great Yarmouth rather than West Berlin. 
It wasn't always like this for Mark however. He did get to work with a member of Tangerine Dream later on, his obvious inspiration. And, less impressive, infact downright criminal, he wrote several hit tunes for page three bimbo Samantha Fox in the mid-eighties!.....I assume those tunes weren't exploratory electronic odysseys like those on 'Phantom'.....would have been fun though to have Sam vocalising to something like this instead of whatever crud she inflicted upon our innocent discotheques?  

DOWNLOAD this phantom to your machine HERE!

Mark Shreeve ‎– "Embryo" (Mirage) 1980

They came with Beards,with bunches of unkempt long hair tied back in unsightly pony-tails, and carried keyboards as their weapons.......no i'm not talking about the Viking Invasion of Northern England!? The Vikings had weaponry at least equal in lethal effect as a Korg Monopoly or Moog Prodigy, but these later invaders were better known as The UK Electronic Underground. An unsubscribed terrorist organisation from the late seventies and early eighties.
Just as those naughty Punk Rockers, with their spitting and their habits, thought we were free forever from a Klaus Schulz hypnotic sequencer driven electronic symphony, or a Tangerine Dream Live album.There appeared, bubbling below the surface, in the very 'Punky',and certainly not Funky, world of DIY Cassette culture, grew a rebellious,or more accurately,Oblivious,infiltration of unrepentant progressive music fans with a spare few quid to spend on the latest polyphonic synthesisers.
One of these bearded invaders was none other than Mark Shreeve,who spread fear throughout the post-punk legions with his hypnotic keyboard sequences,effected electronic dream-scapes,and meandering melodies.Wielding his Prophet 5 like a sword in the hands of a disenchanted east-London born benefit cheat in Islamic State, with a captured Saudi-Arabian Fighter Pilot kneeling in an orange boiler-suit before him.
I exaggerate of course......no-one had the slightest clue this stuff existed in 1980.They were all too busy moonstomping in that bloody awful Two-Tone cult, where everyone dressed like they were in the Specials and had 'Fun' forced down their throats like geese at christmas......Skin'ead Fois Gras anyone?....no thanks!
That stuff makes Mark Shreeve, music and image, look like real rebellion against any kind of Status Quo,new or old (not the band of course!...ps, R.I.P. Rick Parfitt 😭).....(and as of 31/08/2022 R.I.P. Mark Shreeve too!?

Tracklist:
A1 The Keeper
A2 Alive!
B1 Embryo
B2 Iceflakes

DOWNLOAD some embryonic shreeve HERE!

Carl Matthews ‎– "Iridescence" (Mirage ‎– M609) 1983

Another cassette of proggy space synth hypnotic meanderings from the Edger Froese of Cumbria, Mr Carl Matthews.
More of the same electronic background music to accompany a video of a deep space probe scooping up space dust for analysis.
My Analysis is that this is very good for navel gazing in the bath surrounded by scented candles.
A pastime I can't indulge in because I only have two en-suite showers, and no bath, at my gaff, so I just play at being Voyager 3 in my mind, (yes, I have a mind and I know there were only two voyager probes!!!?).
As Voyager one had a golden record bolted to its side showcasing the 'sounds of Earth' as selected by the great Carl Sagan and chums back in 1977, maybe my imaginary Voyager 3 could have some golden cassettes stapled to it's hull? 
I'm sorry to say that Carl Matthews, good as he is, would not probably make the final cut. I'd obviously select Danny and the Dressmakers "39 Golden Grates", Solid Spaces' "Space Museum" and 5XOD's "Dada Computer" tapes as my suggestions. At least if a malevolent Alien race would discover the probe, and by some miracle have a vintage cassette deck available in the junk shops on their planet.They could listen to these tapes and would be profoundly 'put off' the idea of invading Earth to steal 'our women', as the Martians often did in the fifties. Some women to this day still insist they have been abducted and fondled by randy space aliens. One listen to Danny and The Dressmakers and Earth's women would be more than safe from any Groping Greys with ungentlemanly urges. Earth women are in far more danger from the indigenous aliens of our own planet......we call them 'Men'. Those dirty little bleeders with their barely under control sexual urges'n'all! The leader of whom is a creature who looks like Jabba the Hutt in an ill fitting business suit, sometimes described as resembling a chewed piece of gum rolled in cat hair.....yes.....Harvey Wankstain himself. Beam him up Scottie!

Tracklist:

Side 1
A1 Give Love
A2 Trinity
A3 Day Of Forgiveness
A4 Silent Watcher
Side 2
B1 Elemental Moon
B2 Nexus
B3 Iridescence

DOWNLOAD iridescently HERE!

Carl Matthews ‎– "East/West" (Mirage M606) 1982

Another mixture of Berlin School, via Cumbia, synth noodlings, ambient, proto-New Age introspection and minimal analogue repetition from my new favourite of the UK Electronic Underground of the early 80's.
I was always familiar with the other chief protagonists in the seedy underpants of the prog dissenters in post-punk Britain, like Dave Jones,Rick Crane George Garside and the ICR crowd; but only recently have I indulged my ears with the swirling beauty of Carl Matthews' obscure canon.
Dull John Q. Public name aside, it's without doubt music for flotation tanks and astral travelling from the comfort of an armchair, but it does have more meat than most new-age or ambient musics. Something to grasp onto outside of your personal sensory deprivation chamber. All, naturally, full of gorgeous analoginous (made up word?) guano regurgitated by Doves and spread on toast made from ethically recycled cassette tape........Christ! I've spent far too long in that Flotation Tank again!

Tracklist:

A1 Lamb And Lion 8:10
A2 Cause And Effect 11:10
A3 Bridge 5:00
A4 Gura Ma 5:30
B1 East/West 11:40
B2 Aeon 4:30
B3 Cities Of Shan 5:30
B4 Motion 6:10
B5 Nomad 1:10

DOWNLOAD from the east, the west, home's best HERE!

Carl Matthews ‎– "Aksu" (Mirage ‎– M601) 1980

Another mid-twenties space progger who was apparently completely oblivious to the musical revolution happening around him, and carried on playing at being Tangerine Dream into the 80's and beyond. This mini space-synth revival around 1980-4 consisted  wholly of chaps with beards too old for punk ,too young for hippy, with very bland names, living in the most unfashionable rural arseholes of England. Carl Matthews did his astral travelling in darkest Cumbria, a part of England famed for its national parks and Nuclear reprocessing plants; a strange juxtaposition between nature and anti-nature.
Why Carl didn't give himself a cosmic name, like this album title perhaps,I dunno? If he had called himself 'Aksu' and the album was called 'Carl Matthews' my perspective on this tape would have been enhanced. Now all I see is a long haired bloke shut in a bedroom with stacks of expensive synths that he'd saved all his spending money for.Maybe even still living at his mum and dad's place.(Nothing wrong with that of course,it's cheaper, can buy more gear!....that's what I did anyway!)
The music is in fact a rather good modernised take on the Berlin School of keyboard twiddling, and sounds rather gorgeous. Lovely phat analogue warmth, filled with repetitive alien melodies , and less aimless keyboard fingering than is normally heard in this micro-genre.
Unsurprisingly, Carl works mainly in soundtrack production these days....as it says on his Soundcloud page, he describes himself, modestly, as: "An old guy who likes making sounds for Library/Production companies."

Tracklist:
A1 Azzama 3:06
A2 Encounter 6:52
A3 Aksu I 3:12
A4 Unoverse 0:27
A5 Voyager 3 2:10
A6 Aksu II 2:36
A7 Peace Within Chaos 5:16
A8 Look In To Find Out 4:02
B1 Lünaland 14:47
B2 Release 4:15
B3 Aksu III 4:06
B4 Atomic Rage 5:24

DOWNLOAD carl from outer space HERE!

Ian Boddy ‎– "Images" (Mirage) 1980

Another slab of post-prog prog, testcard music for the uninitiated.This is actually quite punk rock in its carbuncular anti-trend stance. If I had heard this in 1980 I would have thought Mr Boddy was having a laugh,but now I know better.He was deadly serious,he really wanted to be Vangelis,and probably still does. 

DOWNLOAD this economy brand chariots of fire HERE!

Ian Boddy - "Elements Of Chance" (Mirage ‎– M602) 1981

Back in '81,while you and your mates were all listening to "cool" music, like Josef K,The Fall,and Cabaret Voltaire. There was always some introspective loner,with a ponytail , and a quietly expressed preference for Tangerine Dream, lurking in the corner of the Sixth-form common room. Just behind the middle class kids in denim jackets with Blue Oyster Cult patches and Genesis written in Biro on their copies of the collected poems of Philip Larkin.
This lot were 'Weird', sucked into the prog vacuum left by Punk Rock,totally oblivious to that rowdy phenomenon,due to their complete and utter mis-comprehension  of anything vaguely proletarian in origin. But the weirdest of the lot was the Tangerine Dream worshipping teenager.
Of course this kind of geek could also find himself a home in Industrial Music, like Chris Carter of Throbbing Gristle,or they could end up like Ian Boddy.
The DIY era gave these misfits a chance to get their electronic symphonies out to bother the public,and so they did.
This stuff can sound like anything from a pale shadow of Steve Reich, to a radio shack Klaus Schulz,to mid-eighties Testcard music. 
This album manages to fit in all of these category's into 45 minutes; but at least he uses a Boss Dr. Rhythm drum box,which was my first drum machine, and I wish i still had it.

Tracklist:

A1 Iaja 4:50
A2 Natural Motion 3:40
A3 Four Views 18:00
B1  Surface Touches 9:05
B2  Elements Of Chance

DOWNLOAD some extremely unfashionable progressive electronics from 1981 HERE!

Colin Potter ‎– "The Ghost Office" (Mirage Records) 1980

 (sorry for the uninspired text,its a cut and paste job from early in my blogging career;originally posted on Nov 8th 2009)

One area that suited the cassette medium down to the ground was DIY Electronica.The most prominent prime mover in this zone was one Colin Potter.Sound engineer and bedroom geek, with a couple of synthesisers and a tape recorder, he took the opportunities available to him, via the new cassette culture,to release his owns works on his own record label(which still exists today!);Integrated Circuit Records.ICR Studio and ICR Distribution have been in existence for over twenty years.
 Colin has been an engineer for over 30 years now, and along his diverse history he has worked with Nurse With Wound, Current 93, Organum, Jonathan Coleclough, Ora, and many others. Being a musician himself, his contributions to these projects are often more than just being the engineer. His music is primarily synthesiser based, and sounds very ‘now’ ,with its minimal electronics and crude rhythms.The muddy quality of the cassette tape gives the sound an time looped quality,like you’re listening through a wall into a bedroom stuck in 1980; or is that just in my mind?
So we bring you his first solo cassette,alas NOT on ICR:

Track Listing:

A1		The Lope I
A2		Falling Downstairs
A3		Fassed
A4		Murder By Furniture
A5		Number Five
A6		All Reel
A7		The Lope II
B1		Mainland
B2		Everybody Dance
B3		You Tell Me
B4		Off The Graph

DELIVER some ghosts from 1980 HERE!

Colin Potter - "Here" (Mirage MK603) 1981

What have we got "here"?
A Colin Potter tape from the early 80's, and rather minimally entitled, "Here"; a pun on the sense, to "Hear" one reckons......arty ain't I?
Not on ICR, but another fine example of non computerized electronics; stuff that is played using hands and primitive contraptions such as that! Ooooo this is good.

Tracklist:

A1		Two Feet On The Ground
A2		Hear
A3		Shallow Water
B1		Gas

DOWNLOAD here HERE!?