Synthpop

This month sees the release of Credo, the new album from my favourite band THE HUMAN LEAGUE. They’ve been an inspiration to me for decades – indeed, this blog is named in honour of those synthpop pioneers. Credo is their first album in ten years so for me this is a very special event. Listen to The Human League 2011 on Spotify: Credo (album) Night People (1st single) Never Let Me Go (2nd single) Sky (3rd single) The Electricity [...]

2011 is already shaping up to being yet another classic year for electronic and synthpop music, especially for fans of the new-wave sound. Here are 5 new releases on Spotify that I especially rate: enjoy these offerings!

As an addict of new music, I’m always on the look out for new bands and artists. Very occasionally I’ll hear something that makes me stop whatever I’m doing, pump up the volume and smile at having found something new that I just know will give me lots of pleasure. Here are ten bands I’ve heard recently that all did that to me; a select few that I’m now watching closely to see what they come up with in 2011.

One of the best things about running a blog like The Pansentient League is that I sometimes get sent new music to listen to. Clark Stiefel from Maison Vague kindly mailed me his new album Synthpop’s Alive a couple of weeks ago and with a title like that I just had to give it a listen. I was instantly wrenched back to a time when Gary Numan ruled the charts, when Devo were evolving in the USA and when synthpop music was born. By the [...]

The brilliant Fujiya & Miyagi are back with a new album called Ventriloquizzing. Building on their 21st-century Krautrock sound, Ventriloquizzing contains eleven brand new songs including the lead single Yo Yo. With production by Thom Monahan (Vetiver, Au Revoir Simone), Ventriloquizzing sees the Brighton-based puppet masters edge towards a darker, more atmospheric sound while retaining their twisted sense of humour. Read on for more, [...]

Rob Grillo (author of “Anoraknophobia“) has just released his new book Is That The 12″ Mix? which you can now buy here. With an exclusive introduction by Martyn Ware (Heaven 17), the book narrates the history of the twelve inch mix and of the remix evolution in the early and mid-80s. The book also includes a chapter on obsessive fans of 80s music. That’s where I come in Before this blog, I ran a website (also [...]

2010 has been another classic year for synthpop, a 1982 to last year’s 1981 perhaps. Choosing my Top 10 synthpop albums of the year has been incredibly difficult, and that was AFTER I’d excluded lots of great albums on the grounds that they’re not strictly synthpop (Anthony Rother, Edge of Dawn, and the wonderful Pacific! album for example). So with the Edinburgh temperature sub-zero for many days now, I stoked the coal [...]

Featuring over four hours of this year’s best synthpop and electropop singles, 2010: The Year We Made Synthpop is a carefully crafted and sequenced playlist that includes over 60 artists to give you a taste of what’s been happening this year in this ever-evolving, always exciting electronic music scene. With new singles from the synthpop old-guard (Human League, OMD, Devo, John Foxx, Erasure) through to electro tunes from the [...]

2010: the resurgence of synthpop continues… I’d expected synthpop and electropop to start to wane after last year’s vintage crop, but if anything the opposite has happened: the number of quality synthpop albums released over the previous 12 months has been phenomenal! There were a good 50-odd albums released this year that could have made it onto this list (and that’s excluding releases that weren’t strictly [...]

“The Parralox Persuasion” by Jer White. A short story to celebrate the release of Metropolis, the third album from Parralox. (with apologies to Iain M. Banks)