The Daily Swarm

The Quietus:

If a record plays to an empty dancefloor, does it make a noise?

There’s a new sound in New York City. OK, not a new sound, exactly – but try to dig back to its roots and you come up with little. Skeletal discographies. Blurred Polaroids. Cryptic biographies in foreign languages. Lost histories and loose ends.

Wierd Records thrive in this territory. Pieter Schoolworth, the DJ and conceptual artist who started Wierd as a New York club night in 2003, has a buzz-phrase for the music he loves, which he uses liberally and often – “Very Rare”.

“Very Rare” applies to a specific dancefloor sound – a generational movement that spread over Europe and across the world during the early 80s, but produced few huge bands or big stars. There are many names for it: synth-wave, minimal wave, Germany’s Neu Deutsch Welle or France’s vague froid – literally, “cold wave”. All, though, refer to a broadly similar style: romantic, often electronic-tinged DIY post-punk inspired by Bowie’s Berlin period and Factory Records, Cabaret Voltaire and The Normal – DIY in spirit but powered by an inexorable, robotic pulse. “The original waves of both the cold wave and the minimal electronic bands were a phenomenon that occurred entirely outside of metropolitan areas like Paris, Berlin, or Amsterdam,” says Schoolwerth. “Many of the most important bands were from the suburbs and small towns, and I think this sense of ‘isolation’ from commercial, metropolitan media informed the music’s expressive sense of longing for community or connection.”

Much of this music has been collected in compilations, most recently Cold Waves And Analogue Electronics Volume One, a compilation pieced together by Schoolwerth and Joe Daniel of British label Angular, which hits shelves this February. This piece, though, is about Wierd’s modern output: two of the bands formed by clubbers who flocked around Wierd’s weekly parties, fell in love with the music, and set out to carry its torch into the 21st Century