Electronic

This is the new instalment of Soul Jazz Records’ ground-breaking Deutsche Elektronische Musik series, ‘A near-definitive guide to some of the world's most extraordinary music’ (The Guardian).

Bülent Arel's (1919 Turkey - 1990 USA) work occupies a special place in the history of electronic music because one thing is certain: Arel's work is still fresh, groundbreaking, and it seems always to look out for the next adventure in sound.

Cold War On The Rocks presents 20 tracks from the history of Finnish disco and early electronic music. The journey goes from orchestral disco to experimental electronic sounds and back. It includes lone 7” singles from relatively unknown performers, interesting album cuts from artists who are better known in completely different musical genres, and also a few electronic artists whose work is rather underrated.

Atmosphere: Electronic Suite is an album by Eloy Fritsch, a keyboard player known for his work in the progressive rock group Apocalypse. As a solo artist he creates cosmic electronic music. The closest comparison would be probably Vangelis, if considering his early work, which included many analogue instruments…

Alternate African Reality is a follow-up to several compilations I have published on Syrphe since 2007 (the first one, Beyond Ignorance and Borders included various artists from Africa and Asia), and even earlier on my defunct tape label in the 1990s (the last tape, Archives Humaines vol.1, was published in 1996 and included 25 artists from 25 countries, including non-Western ones : South Africa, Japan, Chile, Brazil).

One of the first of the blissed-out rave acts to storm the charts, and also one of the longest lasting, the Future Sound of London deserved a good singles compilation, and fortunately they get one with the Virgin retrospective Teachings from the Electronic Brain. Their highest moments were virtually always their singles, and short-form tracks offer a much easier path to understanding the music of Brian Dougans and Garry Cobain than their occasionally bloated LPs. Teachings from the Electronic Brain neglects nothing of real value, beginning with their first chart hit ("Papua New Guinea") and grabbing the best tracks from their albums Accelerator ("Expander"), Lifeforms (the title track), the live-in-the-studio ISDN ("Far-Out Son of Lung and the Ramblings of a Madman," "Smokin' Japanese Babe"), and Dead Cities ("We Have Explosive"). Best of all, licensing requirements prevented the addition of material from 2002's half-baked The Isness.