Many of the most innovative, influential, and culturally significant artists failed to achieve real recognition during their years active. The likes of The Velvet Underground and Suicide were far from popular at the time, only acquiring legendary status subsequently.
Grey Factor – pioneers of the Los Angeles underground art damage electronic music scene – haven’t yet achieved such status, their bio suggesting that they have been ‘more myth than legend for over 45 years’. A brace of retrospective releases in 2023 & 2024 – ‘1979-1980 A.D. Complete Studio Recordings’ and ‘A Peak In The Signal: Live 1979-1980’ – both on Damaged Disco received critical acclaim, and led to ‘Paste Magazine’ including the ‘1979-1980 A.D.’ LP in their ‘50 Greatest Synth Pop Albums Of All Time in 2024’. Even so, the chances are you missed these, and so now Damaged Disco have brought the two albums together, and added nine unreleased pieces they call the In-Betweens, which we learn were ‘created out of necessity in 1979–1980, pre-recorded and played between their live performances, these sonic interludes filled the dead space while they reprogrammed their temperamental analog synths between songs’, as well as their first new studio recordings in 45 years, to create a truly ‘complete’ recordings.
As the detail around the ‘In-Betweens’ and the title remind us, these were different times. The emerging technology was nothing short of revolutionary, and early adopters were breaking new ground with every step. The future that seemed possible was one of incredibly exciting potential, in much the same way, twenty years later, the Internet would offer so much. From the contemporary vantage, both the advent of synths and the Internet changed music, and the world, forever, both for better and worse. But we tend to forget the buzz around the time, where it seemed that the future was here, now, and before we knew if we would have flying cars and living on the moon.
The material contained within this 2-disc set combines elements of Krautrock and synth pop, at times showcasing the pop savvy of Sparks, others the discipline of Kraftwerk, and elsewhere, as on ‘Guerilla Warfare’ we get straight-up goth / darkwave, the doomy stylings of The Cure circa ‘Faith’ and ‘Pornography’, while ‘Joyful Sounds’ offers the template for New Order’s ‘Movement’. Samples and loops abound, and while that was ground that was first broken in the late 1950s and early 1960s, it wasn’t until the early 80s, when the likes of Foetus and Cabaret Voltaire began to utilise them substantially in a musical context, and it was rather later in the decade when they came to provide the fabric of dance music. ‘Inhibitions Run Wild’ is more or less Joy Divison’s ‘Decades’ in many ways – with added sax.
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The quality of the songs – not to mention the range – on here is remarkable, as is the application of the technology. Songs like ‘No Emotion’ are easy to take for granted as examples of spiky post-punk now, with fairly primitive production – but the context and the timing changes the narrative significantly. It’s not hard to understand why vintage synths have become so collectible, and so fetishised – reproductions and emulators simply don’t have that sound – but what this is missing is the fact that even vintage gear can’t recreate the zeitgeist. And that’s really what comes across on this compilation.
Grey Factor were clearly a long, long way ahead of the game – and of course, had disappeared before anyone else got remotely close to catching up. And now, with this release, it’s our turn to catch up on their short-lived but groundbreaking career.
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