My Review:
v/a Prophecy Progress * Uk Electronics 1978-1990 volume I + 2
Pupils.
Always.
Without doubt.
We return to school at last, in the electronic gymnasium that in the second half of the 1970s threw open windows, doors and whole skies to give vitality to music that was beginning a period of dangerous fatigue and repetitiveness.
One can better consider, through this miraculous and courageous action of the fantastic Label called Peripheral Minimal Records (always active and always able to give generous quality performances), all those innovative, experimental artists, capable of a fierce and generous avant-garde. All this becomes necessary at a time when, engulfed with not always good proposals, more knowledge of history, its path, its undoubted masters and precursors would be needed.
Peripheral Minimal Records does this by giving to the press this resounding flood of sounds, of stylistic approaches, of essential cosmic arrows, of minutes in which everything is traced with precision and credibility, for an educational and complementary listening: it adds information for those who did not know them, while it confirms to those who had already been able to learn that in these tracks secrets and pacts with eternity are revealed.
Much has started from those impulses, those needs, the will to deliver a brilliant and essentially necessary universe for anyone with a penchant for these vocations of great stylistic expression.
This album is a surgical operation, a perfect one: it extracts a healthy mass from a period from 1978 to 1990, years that were extraordinary but also difficult because of the volume of proposals that were not always known, let alone specified.
You have the opportunity in the 28 tracks on CD (26 on Bandcamp) to get excited, to find immense jewels, some unknown, some with a few rays on their skin, others of which I think you already have knowledge.
But all of them are miracles, in ability, in value, in an unquestionable propensity to serve as a prerequisite and foundation for developments that, punctually, over the decades have come, because this foundation was filled with strength, energy and beauty.
And it is a rush through the mysteries of wonder, into pulsing channels of transistors, keyboards in their early days, stratagems and flights, to analyze all that was moving in the minds, hearts and fingers of artists complicit in fascinations frothing at the mouth, with the desire to fully act with an enormous passion.
Unripe but delicious fruits, sometimes ghostly, other times as bright as the mid-August sun, and still others nebulous with the intention of not uncovering too much: there are moments when we cannot fully grasp the importance, the restlessness, the identity of bodies that in a wonderful way have survived the passage of time.
But it is a whirlwind, a thickening of hungry atoms, a manifest ability to elegance that extorts awe and devotion from us, since in these minutes we can feel the past vibrating, that past which has generated the present and all its path through time, in order to index our listening towards meticulous precision.
This is not a compilation.
Nothing is a guarantee of an easy entry on this double CD: true teaching exists when you don't stop learning, wanting to learn. And some moments will test your taste, your real willingness to go beyond all that because it is clear that nothing here was composed to blow you away in a joyful attitude. There is some effort to be made for those who are less accustomed to having a different quality and ability in listening.
And then it will be possible to note, to search their tank for the fuel of dutiful and necessary awareness.
Juicy moments will enter, if you leave the veins of curiosity and study open, through the paths of your listening: for instance we can mention Vice Versa, absolute precursors, Schleimer K, four Brits with their pre-Ebm and Synth-Pop fragrances aligned in a spacey technical wanderings, the spectral Neu Electrikk, with forty seconds that made in advance the history of post-punk horror, later transformed by The Cure into Seventeen Seconds.
With Final Program, the seeds of The Human League from their earlier years emerge along with the lesson of Master Klaus Naomi resulting in sonic magic tricks. Stress is an agglomeration of wicked and delicious madness: they will be able to lead you into the tubes of their pulsing. The song Live by Hula is a testament to the sanctity of stylistic blends put under the whip by an elaborate drumming and a sacrilegious bass.
But all the tracks are a cognitive structural encyclopedia to take possession of in order to understand the whole that we often have at our disposal and do not want to know.
Fundamental, its purchase should be made mandatory!
Alex Dematteis
Musicshockworld
Salford
4th November 2022
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