synth pop

This is a trailer for Yellow’s new Touch Yello virtual concert and their new album, Touch Yello.

Yello is a Swiss electronica band consisting of Dieter Meier and Boris Blank, best known for their 80’s hit Oh, Yeah, which was featured in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

via lightosphere:

Trailer for the new Touch YELLO Virtual concert, which premiered Oct. 1st in Berlin at Kino International.

Drowned In Sound has published an interview with synth pop pioneer Thomas Dolby.

In the interview, Dolby shares some fantastic stories, like this one:

I remember word going around that the UK branch of the Musician’s Union was going to vote on a motion to ban synthesizers. A friend of mine from a band called Landscape told me this, and said we had to get some people down there because they were actually going to put it to the vote. The motion that was on the table was that synthesizers would be banned altogether, because they were taking work away from musicians. So ten of us went down there, one row of about 30, 40 people, and the rest of the people were like, out of work flugelhorn players, people who occasionally did West End musicals, and they were all half asleep. Each of the ten of us in turn got up and spoke very passionately and very articulately about how we felt it was progress and it was a good thing, and ultimately would lead to more work for musicians. Then it went to the vote and it got voted in! The British Musician’s Union had banned synthesizers! I think it was only afterwards that the executive manager of the Musician’s Union realised how impossible it would be to implement, so it was sort of swept under the carpet and we never heard about it again.

This is a promo for Kraftwerk’s The Catalogue, 2009 digitally remastered releases of their most important albums.

The albums include:

• Autobahn (1974)
• Radio-Activity – (German title: Radio-Aktivität) (1975)
• Trans-Europe Express – (German title: Trans-Europa Express) (1977)
• The Man-Machine – (German title: Die Mensch-Maschine) (1978)
• Computer World – (German title: Computerwelt) (1981)
• Electric Café (1986) – (here given its original name of Techno Pop)
• The Mix (1991)
• Tour de France Soundtracks (2003) – (now titled Tour de France)

Individual albums will be available Oct 5th, and the box set Nov 16th. Read more…

Gary Numan performing Cars live with Nine Inch Nails at the O2 Arena London, 15th July 2009.

via petey1978

This music video, by Jonathan Beamish, is for the earliest recorded version of Joy Division’s Love Will Tear Us Apart, produced as a John Peel Session for the BBC in 1979.

via jonathanbeamish:

The original band footage is a mixture of a performance video shot by the band for the single release (minus the damaged shots) and live concert excerpts from Plank, Brussels and the Apollo, Manchester. We needed to do some tricky retiming and editing to sync it up with the footage which is from completely different versions of the song.Odd to discover that much of the original performance video done for the single release wasn’t edited properly with much of the shots of the band playing not cut accurately to the audio