BitBoy Backgrounder

A Brief History of BitBoy's SynthPop Influences:
The year was 1981. I was 11 years old and attending Junior High School in a suburb near Los Angeles. At that time, I had never really been "into" any specific type of music. Usually I just tuned my trusty AM/FM stereo into the one of the local pop or top 40 stations and listened to whatever the DJ happened to cue up. Until one day, when I heard my first song by the amazing godfathers of all things Synth, Kraftwerk. I was listening to "The Mighty 690" AM radio station, and some intelligent and tasteful individual requested the song "Trans-Europe Express" -- amazingly the station played it. I was completely entranced. Kraftwerk's hauntingly melodic sounds, steady and precise percussion, and monotone vocals appealed to something deep within me. I immediately insisted my parents drive me to the mall so I could purchase this song on 45 (remember 45s?). However, it wasn't quite that easy. The local record store didn't carry Kraftwerk 45s as part of their regular inventory. It had to be special ordered, so I did. I waited for what seemed like an eternity. When it finally arrived, I played it over and over again until I had practically no needle left on my turntable. It was amazing. I was hooked. At the time, I didn't realize the significance of that experience. Little did I know the act of special ordering, searching through endless bins of records and eventually CDs would be repeated countless times throughout the years in pursuit of SynthPop nirvana.

Shortly after that, I discovered KROQ (an LA "Modern Rock" FM station). Thanks to them I had been exposed to a whole slew of favorite songs from Alphaville, Depeche Mode, Eurythmics, Yaz, and so on. I then moved to a suburb of San Francisco, and adopted a surrogate radio station called "The Quake", which, sadly, went off the air only to be superseded by "Live105". Thanks to Live105 and DJs like Steve Masters, I was exposed to dozens of new artists like Camouflage, Cetu-Javu, Red Flag, Cause and Effect and Secession. In the late 80's other sources of new music also manifested themselves now that I was both mobile (had a car), and old enough to get into nightclubs like San Francisco's "the X" and "City Nights" which both featured some great "Modern Rock" nights. Thanks to some great nightclub DJs and fellow clubgoers I was introduced to some awesome DJ-only labels like "Razormaid!" and "Art of Mix" which helped my music collection multiply quickly.

As the 80's ended and the 90's begun, I found myself in a musical wasteland. The "Grunge" movement was saturating the airwaves of my once-beloved radio station, to the point where it was utterly unlistenable, and the clubs were now pumping out 170 BPM euro-techno. Thankfully, a core group of bands like Depeche Mode and New Order continued to produce enjoyable music which sustained me until I discovered the on-line world in 1993. Thanks to e-mail, newsgroups and a few (relatively scarce at the time) websites, I was able to meet and discuss my musical obsessions with like minded enthusiasts.

Today, thankfully we are in the midst of an electronic music rebirth, and it's never been easier to both find rare titles and buy incredible new releases. Retail websites like "A Different Drum" cater to the SynthPop aficionado, and serve as a recording label for aspiring new artists. Newsgroups like alt.music.synhpop are a great resource and fantastic personal sites like Blake's SynthPop Page (whose site inspired BitBoy's - Thanks Blake) and, hopefully, Bitboy's are exposing more and more great classic SynthPop rarities.

Enjoy,

- BitBoy

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