Joel Graham

"An obscure tape release discovery by Red Light Radio founder and close friend of the label, Orpheu de Jong, led to Music From Memory’s latest release. This two track 12” highlights the work of electronic music pioneer Joel Graham, a San Francisco based artist who self released two cassettes in 1984/85.
Originally recorded and performed live on pre-MIDI analogue equipment in 1982 as an outline for a live performance, these visionary tracks provoke much of the same sensibilities found in both contemporary dance music as well as in works of more established vanguard artists of the time. Slowly unravelling and deeply hypnotic, Joel Graham’s music seems to manifest a doorway to a profound new world and can be seen as a forerunner of what was to come in electronic music."

AOTY #18. Elektro Guzzi - Clones

Live performances of electronic music have gone a long way since the seminal decision of a few men from Düsseldorf to leave their Krautrock beginnings behind and to become machines. Since then, the list of successors is epic and technologically refined in the process: from the musicians who on stage incorporated electronics into their post punk aesthetics to today's laptop PAs blurring the lines between performance and DJ set in a club context.
 As digital as they may sound, they couldn't be more analogue, producing and performing with the most classic of all setups: bass, guitar, and drums. But however traditional they may look as a band, they certainly do not sound like one. As fascinating as the resulting music already sounds on their debut releases for Macro (produced by Austrian legend Patrick Pulsinger), the band is perfectly able to bring it on stage. There, they connect the hypnotizing force of their analogue techno with the visual treat of a band doing it all right in front of your eyes. Take everything above, put it on a studio album and you have a bomb. You hear it, you witness it, and you dance...