Lo-fi electronic music

In mid-1978, a curious spate of cultural synchronicity found "Warm Leatherette" being released at around the same time as several other lo-fi electronic singles, all put out on indie labels: Throbbing Gristle's "United", Cabatet Voltaire's Extended Play EP, Human League's "Being Boiled", Robert Rental's "Paralysis" and Thomas Leer's "Private Plane".
"There was this period when they all came out, one after the other", recalls Leer. "And it was like, 'Where are all these weird records coming from?' None of us knew each other. There was obviously something brewing."
Actually, Thomas Leer and Robert Rental did know each other. Two Scottish friends who'd moved down to London at the height of punk, Leer and Rental, like Miller, were inspired to put out their own records by the Desperate Bicycles' example.

Throbbing Gristle - United - 1978


Cabaret Voltaire - Do the Mussolini - 1978


The Human League - Being Boiled - 1978


Robert Rental - Paralysis - 1978


"Private Plane" sounded electronic, but Leer didn't actually own a synth. Instead he processed his guitar and bass using various gadgets and played Rental's stylophone (a gimmicky electronic keyboard played with a pen) through an echo effect. All these gauzy silverswirl textures gave "Private Plane" an ethereal feel perfect for its mood of remote serenity tinged with wistfulness, loosely inspired by a recent TV program about the reclusive multimillionaire Howard Hughes. Leer's fey voice is equally perfect, but owed something to contingency: he had to whisper the vocal because the recording took place at night in his one-room apartment and he didn't want to wake his girlfriend.

Thomas Leer - Private Plane - 1978

The Normal - Warm Leatherette

Working in his North London bedroom, Daniel Miller, aka the Normal, created "T.V.O.D." and "Warm Leatherette", the two sides of his self-released debut single as the Normal.
The Normal's sound was electropunk. "Warm Leatherette" especially - all harsh stabs of analog-synth distortion and dispassionately perverse lyrics about the eroticism of car accidents, via Ballard's Crash - could hardly have been further from the floridly romantic keyboard synth arpeggios of prog rock.
The single did unexpectedly well, selling thirty thousand copies, and inadvertently turned Miller into the CEO of his own record label. Mute Records was the name he'd put on the back of the single, along with his home address. Many people assumed Mute was a proper record label specializing in weird electropop. Within a week of the release of "Warm Leatherette" all kind of peculiar demo tapes started arriving in the mail.

The Normal - Warm Leatherette - 1978


The Normal - T.V.O.D. - 1978

The Desperate Bicycles

DIY's most fervent evangelists, the Desps chanted "it was easy, it was cheap - go and do it" at the end of their early 1977 debut "Smokescreen". That slogan then became the chorus of "The Medium Was Tedium", the follow-up released later that same year. "No more time for spectating", they declared on "Don't Back the Front", an antifascist anthem on the flip side of "Medium", adding the listener-inciting battle cry "cut it, press it, distribute it/Xerox music's here at last". A sleeve note revealed that "Smokescreen had cost only £ 153 and said the band "would really like to know why you haven't made your single yet".
As for the Desps' actual music, it was almost puritan in its unadorned simplicity, its guitar sound frugal to the point of emaciation. For the Desperate Bicycles, it was as though sloppiness and scrawniness became signs of membership in the true punk elect. The very deficiency of traditional rock virtues (tightness, feel) stood as tokens of the group's authenticity and purity of intent.

The Desperate Bicycles - Smokescreen - 1977


The Desperate Bicycles - The Medium Was Tedium - 1977


The Desperate Bicycles - Don't Back the Front - 1977

Factory Records

The label's first release, A Factory Sample, was a double EP packaged in glistening silver. "It just seemed so special", says Paul Morley, who was NME's Manchester correspondent at the time. "The fact that it was so beautiful looking showed the possibilities of what could be done, and it showed up the London record industry for being so boring".

Soon Factory was outdoing Fast Product's collectible Earcom samplers and bizarre packages like Quality of Life by bringing a Marcel Duchamp-like absurdism to their catalog. Numbers were assigned to anything and everything: pipe dreams, whims, unrealized projects, movies that were never finished or never started.
Fac 8 was a menstrual egg timer proposed by Linder but never actually constructed. Fac 99 was a dental bill for Factory codirector Rob Gretton, who'd had his molars reconstructed. Fac 61 was a lawsuit from the label's former house producer Martin Hannett.

The Secret Public - 1977

Released at the very end of 1977, almost a full year after Spiral Scratch, ORG-2 wasn't even a record, but a booklet of collages by Linder (singer in the band Ludus) and Jon Savage (journalist for Sounds magazine). "It didn't have a cover price, so it didn't sell very well. Nobody knew what to sell it for!" laughs Boon. "But it did its job. The title The Secret Public was all about that other side of the DIY thing - trying to locate kindred spirits who would 'get it' and respond".

(Scans taken from: www.goldminetrash.blog.co.uk)