After a few years of delving into minimal, new way, NDW and the like, I discovered this compilation after wandering into Aquarius on a sunny Saturday walking down Valencia.
EPIC
Aquarius Records’ review:
BART: Bay Area Retrograde (Vol. 1) (Dark Entries) lp
A few years back, Minimal Wave offered some choice crate digging collections of nearly forgotten darkwave and post-punk electronics through their Lost Tapes and Found Tapes collections, highlighting the differences between the European and American models of underground new wave. Dark Entries produced this anthology in that same tradition, focusing even more tightly on the geography of the Bay Area. As Johnny Ray Huston so rightly points out in the liner notes, San Francisco in the ’80s had its own unique crucible of local events that shaped the Bay Area’s particular sound (e.g. the assassination of Harvey Milk, the growing AIDS epidemic and the fear surrounding the disease, etc.). While there’s none of the art-damaged abstraction filtered from The Residents, Snakefinger, or Tuxedomoon in an obvious lineage to the artists featured here, BART (named after the subway that connects Oakland, Berkeley, and other parts of the East Bay to San Francisco) is a great collection of quirky minimal wave electronics, with a fair amount of unreleased material from obscurant Bay Area new wave bands.
Nomimal State opens the compilation and was from the suburban hamlet of Danville, recording this demo 1983 with a militantly uptempo drum machine and urgent synth lines. It’s a track that easily fits next to the likes of The Units and Nervous Gender in terms of manic, punkish use of electronics. Speaking of The Units, they round out the compilation in contributing their sci-fi pop anthem “Mission,” which is still bitchin’ after all these years! Voice Farm is the other ‘big name’ to appear on this compilation, contributing a sinewy darkwave number from their 1982 album “The World We Live In.” Batang State, Quiet Room, and Necropolis Of Love offer more Joy Division / Wire / Kraftwerk atmospheric post-punk number with considerable panache. The Wasp Women were a crossdressing trash-punk outfit, whose demo featured a wastoid lo-fi number and had appeared in the 1982 film “What Ever Happened To Susan Jane.” Danny Boy & The Serious Party Gods offer a fabulously campy disco number with suitably over-the-top raunchy lyrics that ramble on and on against anthemic synths. If there’s one track that you need to hear from this compilation it’s this one! But the whole collection is very well done, and comes highly recommended as with everything that Dark Entries releases.
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