Here’s a topic I don’t really talk about enough sometimes, and it beats just posting an AI or Hero Forge image from my setting. I miss Todd Durant of A Different Drum. Back in the 90s and early 00s, the synthpop musical genre, which had enjoyed enormous success in the 80s, had the market fall out from under it as we underwent a pop culture disruption. This also coincided in my particular case with a disruption in my partaking of pop culture, because I was in Argentina serving a mission for the Church from Jan 1991 through Feb 1993. When I got back, all of the cool electronic pop music that had been popular when I left was underground, and instead we had all kinds of grunge and other assorted Seattle hipster music; a group of styles that I still kind of resent. After struggling to find new music to listen to (I experimented with some Euro-dance, but it just didn’t hit the same way, and I don’t really like all that much of Ace of Bass, 2 Unlimited, Real McCoy, etc) compared to the earlier Depeche Mode, Erasure, Pet Shop Boys, etc. music. And a lot of the bands that continued changed their sound too. There was only so much obscure back catalog to be found, although the arrival of the Internet on my college campus helped. Of course, I rapidly found that there was an underground scene for synthpop, and it wasn’t just focused on talking about Depeche Mode and Erasure, or even the slightly more “fringe” groups like Seven Red Seven or Cause & Effect or Camouflage or Red Flag or some of the others who were sorta one-hit wonders… for a generous definition of hit. Genuinely newer bands were creating a scene, like De/Vision, Mesh, and many others. Some of these, like the stable of the early Synthphony Records label had a lot of duds; I bought a lot of those early CDs in the late 90s only to find that they were mostly… mediocre and forgettable. But the scene gathered a lot of steam relatively rapidly, and really good stuff started coming out. Much of it was fed to me by the mailing list of A Different Drum, which started as a store, and eventually became more of a distributor and even record label of a lot of the really good stuff. Some of my favorite post 80s synthpop work came out of this crucible. Album’s like Iris’s Disconnect, for instance and some of the early Cosmicity albums, are still albums that I consider landmark standouts of the genre overall.
Another one that really hit well and became an early favorite was B! Machine’ s Infinity Plus. B! Machine had a pretty unique sound; his vocals and harmonies were unlike anyone else in the biz, his song structures were a little unusual and more artsy, less poppy, and he definitely had a unique very minimalist synthesizer sound. I really liked B! Machine and kept track of his new releases for a number of years. Although I’ve often wandered far afield in my musical tastes, and a lot of what I listen to today is older Hard Trance, early Hardstyle, and other intense rave music, or I listen to orchestral (real or synthesized) new and classical music.
But B! Machine is one that comes up frequently and I replay his stuff. But because it had been a number of years since I’d seen a new release, and hadn’t looked in… I dunno, a few years. Turns out that B! Machine did come out with a magnificent double album (23 tracks) about two years ago, and although I’ve (so far) only listened to it all the way through twice, I’m pretty confident in saying that it’s his best work. Which is cool; there are so many bands or artists that start out strong, and then either lose their way or meander through varying quality; B! Machine has probably always had a fairly consistent high quality, but he has had a gradual evolution in pretty cool new ways. Jarkko Tuohimaa of Neuroactive did some co-production on a number of tracks on Infinity Plus, and the two have very complementary sounds with some similar elements, but it clearly helped B! Machine see new ways of integrating beefier percussive and bass elements. (Although his unique approach to that was part of the uniqueness of his sound; I’m glad it was Tuohimaa instead of someone else who took it that direction. Like I said, they had some similarities that complemented each other without actually messing up his sound, I think.)
Over time, many of his tracks have become less cold, but still unique, and his synths—while still sounding very similar—are a bit less minimalistic than they used to be. But these changes aren’t unwelcome; B! Machine still has a unique signature sound, even as it’s not exactly the same sound that he was exploring 25-30 years ago.
I highly recommend checking out B! Machine’s “new” album Snake Charm Girl. Check it out on Spotify or YouTube and then go buy it on Bandcamp.
Right now, if someone were to ask me to give a sampling of my taste of music, I’d give four albums to be representative, and this one would be one of them. Even though it’s new to me, it’s a perfect encapsulation of my synthpop taste, and I’ve been a big fan of B! Machine’s older work for many years already.
The other three would be Der Ring Ohne Worte; the Mazaal arrangement of Wagner’s Der Ring, although I also like several the Tarkmann interpretation. (Or any interpretation, actually. I’ve got several recordings of the de Vlieger summary too). Then maybe the Gladiator soundtrack by Hans Zimmer, and the Bas & Ram setlist from In Qontrol 2004, which you can find on YouTube and probably Soundcloud. That’s only a small sampling, but it gets you sufficiently there to understand the breadth of my taste.
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