Techno-Punking With Minimal Wave

We live in an age where if we want to discover new music, it’s as easy as plugging in a broad Google search and you’re off and running. But what if the music you loved never made the jump into cyber space and remained in obscurity? Would you dig it up and share it to the world, or hoard it all to yourself like a snot-nosed twerp with his Halloween candy (seasonal reference). Luckily for us, Veronica Vasicka decided to share. Her Minimal Wave label unearths hidden synth gems that were way ahead of their time and re-releases them on wonderful vinyl for all of us to enjoy.

I walked up the street from Noisey’s lair to chat with Veronica about the label and drool over her awesome synths….

Noisey: So you just got back from Europe, how was that?
Veronica Vasicka: It was really excellent, it was a short trip this time. I had two gigs in Paris and then Amsterdam, so I was only gone for a week. Lately, I have been doing shorter trips and then coming back.

And you’re DJing Minimal Wave stuff and what else?
I bring in a whole range of stuff. Most of the time, it starts out with Minimal Wave stuff and then I go more towards techno, Italo disco and things like that.

Do you find that when you’re DJing these minimal electronic sets in Europe, the reception is better? Do they have a better understanding of what it’s all about?
I think that there's just a receptiveness to electronic music in general, a greater receptiveness than there is in the States, but now I think that’s changing. If you think about people who were raised in Germany with Kraftwerk on the radio, that must have made a huge difference.

You have a lot going on, between running the label, DJing, and writing your own music. What lead up to all of this?
I think it all started around East Village Radio, but before that, my brother was really into new wave when I was a teenager. I was 11, he was 13, and he had all his tapes, so that was like the beginning. I then started making mixtapes off the radio. There was radio station called LIR on Long Island, but you could get it in Manhattan. I would listen to this indie alternative station and make mixtapes. Every month, I would make a mixtape and give them to my friends—I’d do the artwork and everything.

So you were doing this sort of compilation process way before Minimal Wave. Do you remember any of the artists you were including in these tapes?
It was mostly stuff that was coming out on Mute Records, and bands like Cabaret Voltaire, SPK, and Front 242, but they played a whole range of stuff, like they’d play The Cure, The Smiths, more mainstream new wave, then they’d play more obscure stuff. I was grabbing the more obscure stuff back then without even knowing! I thought everyone listened to this station, I didn’t think it was that obscure. I then started working at a record store in high school, so after school, I would go to the record store to work. I didn’t think that was weird either, but now in retrospect, for a girl to work at a record store at 15 during that time is a little advanced, maybe.

So for those who don’t know, what exactly is Minimal Wave as a label?
It's a label that's focused on early eighties electronic music, mostly stuff that was recorded in bedroom studios without much equipment, was minimally produced but does not necessarily sound lo-fi. Music that was made predominantly with drum machines, synthesizers, and sometimes guitar. A lot of the artists self released stuff on cassette and didn’t have proper distribution at the time, so what I do is select and curate work. Some of these artists have hundreds and hundreds of recordings, and so it’s great to go through and find the ones that really work well together.

Nowadays, when it’s so easy to go on the Internet and sort of dig for music, I really think of you as someone that is doing it the old fashion way. How do you go about finding this stuff?
There was a big turning point because things weren’t really being blogged at the time I had registered the domain name, which was 2004. I had been going to record fairs in Europe and here, I was doing some DJ gigs in Brooklyn, but I wasn’t doing any over there yet. It was all this stuff at the fairs and at record shops that were in upstate New York and New Jersey that no longer exist. I think, around that time, there was a big turning point, even though a lot of music started really being blogged in 2008 or something like that. Before that, I would search for bands on the Internet and there was nothing, and now recently, all of this information is coming up and it’s overwhelming. Sometimes, I don’t even bother searching for a specific artist that I have been looking for because it just gets overwhelming. I just miss the old way of finding something. Going to the record store and finding something just by accident and buying it maybe just because it looks cool. Discovery in a slow way is kind of what I'm trying to do with the label. the process of you listen to this music, then buy the record, put it on your turntable, look at the artwork and read about the band, instead of just Googling. We do have a digital distributor now, so we do have our stuff available on iTunes and Beatport, but the main focus of the label is still vinyl.

How did you decide on the name Minimal Wave?
Well, I think it had to with my interest in minimal synth and French coldwave at the time. I was kind of looking for some umbrella term that covered all of that. Coldwave includes guitars, and when people were referring to minimal synth on things like Ebay, it was just about minimal electronics with no guitars and super simple song structures. Coldwave, on the other hand, was more like Frances answer to Factory Records. I saw them as two totally separate things that I was interested in, but I also did see an overlap that kept happening where artists would incorporate guitars and it wasn’t so strictly electronic, so I wanted a term that would cover all of this. There was also the term "tekno-punk", which I was really fascinated by.

What exactly is tekno-punk?
I have a record from France from 1983 and on the back it says "tekno-punk" in little letters. I thought it was so interesting—like, this is exactly what this is all about. I didn’t want to include punk in the title though, even though a lot of the characteristics of Minimal Wave are punk and D.I.Y. It’s not about having a big budget, but instead, more about just getting out there. [Laughs] I couldn’t have Minimal Synth-Punk Wave, it’s just too long.

There is an obvious attraction to synthesizers and drum machines with what you do as a label. Where did that come from?
I think I just had an affinity to synthesizers super early on. My parents gave me a Casio keyboard when I was 11, and I just got obsessed with it, the simplicity of the sounds. I also think its fascinating that they’re these machines that are compacted, yet there is such a range of sounds in them. At the time that they were built, they were suppose to be these machines that replace actual instruments—like, if we don’t have a drummer, we can just use a drum machine.I feel like eventually it took on a life of its own, and the music that people started making had its own tone and character that had nothing to do with having a full band; the machines just took on a life of their own.

One of your artists that we find interesting is Ohama. Can you tell us a little bit about his story?
He grew up on a potato farm in Alberta, Canada and the first synthesizer that he saw was when he was coming back from Judo class. He saw this synthesizer shop and I’m not sure exactly what synth it was but he saw it in the window and was just fixated on getting it. I think that’s when he was about fifteen. That experience just evolved into an obsession and fascination with synthesizers and he ended up building a studio on the potato farm in a shed. He taught himself how to engineer and his stuff is really well produced. He was really influenced by John Fox and a whole range of genres like 70s classic rock and a whole bunch of punk stuff. He described listening to AM radio while he was driving around on the farm and using the tones from the radio as influence, he was completely isolated. There was a zine called the Contact List Of Electronic Music and Ohama was in there. It was published by a guy named Alex Douglas in Vancouver, and it just had everything an electronic music obsessive would need: record labels addresses, artists addresses, record shops addresses, etc. From that, Ohama ended up on this French synth compilation in 1985. It was a box set called SNX Box Set. This put him side by side with some French artists as well as artists from Germany, Sweden, Belgium, America, like-minded artists from all over the world. Before that, he had started his own record label called Ohama Records, which I’m assuming was funded by the potato farm because they made potato chips and other potato products there. Anyway, Ohama started this Ohama label and just self released his own full lengths and collaborations. He had this one album called Love Only Lasts a While, which is him doing these duets with a women named named Dania, who was originally from Russia and she has this beautifully intriguing voice. He has a fascinating story.

How did you get in touch with him?
He actually contacted me in 2005 when I started the label. He was presenting a box set that he was self-releasing, which I think was 10 CDs of material. From there, he was talking about coming to visit New York with his son, and I was at East Village Radio so, I had him come to the station and I did an interview with him in January of 2006. We’ve been in contact ever since.

One of the things that makes the label so great is this curation of very sort of specific electronic music but is there other stuff you listen to?
I see a lot of similarities between the Minimal Wave sound and the sounds of techno and perhaps they're using some of the same gear but in a different way, theres some great stuff coming out now in Germany and the UK. Recently I've been super into what Silent Servant is doing (his Negative Fascination record is stunning) and essentially everything that comes out on Downwards. Other stuff like Powell and Pye Corner Audio is also really interesting.

Is there a favorite story you have of one the artists you’ve dug up?
That’s tough. I think In Aeternam Vale is really interesting because initially he sent me a bunch of tracks around 2006. There were, like, 200 of them, and he kept sending more and more amazing stuff. There was this techno track I released; it’s the b-side of the Dust Under Brightness twelve-inch—it was so ahead of its time, he recorded it in 1987. What I love about his stuff is that there’s a huge range; he was making really edgy synth-punk at one point, and then two years later, he was making this sort of really washed out techno, just pushing the limits. So I put that twelve-inch out and then I kept coming across these other recordings of his and I would keep asking about these found tapes, so he would digitize the masters, send them and that kept happening. The whole time, I was thinking about how much material this guy had recorded—it’s endless. A lot of the experiences with the artists is that they have their 8-tracks or whatever they initially recorded on and that's it, they didn’t record anything else, so that’s always a little bit sad sometimes. Deux, for example, are an amazing band, but they in total have 18 songs and that’s all, so the story with In Aeternam Vale is great, because he keeps giving more and more, so that makes things interesting.

Have you seen an influx of interest over the past few years as electronic music—maybe not in the Minimal Wave form—but electronic music just in general becomes more embedded in popular culture?
Yeah definitely, we’ve been repressing a lot of our stuff because there is an influx of people who are interested in this music. Now there are new bands that are making purely electronic music and synth-wave, so the fans of that music are digging deeper and coming to us and buying stuff which is fantastic.

What do you have coming up?
There’s a bunch of stuff happening now: we’re doing another In Aeternam Vale twelve-inch with some tracks that he recorded which are super long. I’m playing with Chris and Cosey at Berghain, which I think is the best club in Europe, so I’m really excited about that. I’ve been fans of Chris and Cosey for so long, and I grew up listening to Throbbing Gristle, so it will be a huge honor to play with them. It’s all very exciting.

Be sure to pick up Ohama - The Potato Farm Tapes LP out now on Minimal Wave.