This track comes from Madalyn Merkey’s album Scent, released earlier this year. The album was mastered right here in Chicago at Experimental Sound Studio, which is definitely worth looking into; Merkey is a Chicagoan herself. She released the album on New Images Ltd., which is run by Real Estate’s Matthew Mondanile, aka Ducktails. Though this song features mostly synthesizer and effects, the album features heavily vocoded and otherwise processed vocals. Though I am wary to make unnecessary comparisons, I can’t help but draw parallels between her and fellow synth-goddess Laurie Spiegel. Decide for yourself!

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Composer Sohichiro Suzuki began releasing instrumental music as World Standard in 1985. “The Lonely Driver 1952” comes from his 1997 album Country Gazette, which was produced by Haruomi Hosono and released on Hosono’s Daisyworld Records. Country Gazette is the first volume of a three-part Discovering America series, which arose out of Suzuki’s interest in combining electronics with the sound of ’60s American folk music. According to the liner notes, Country Gazette was inspired by John Fahey and attempts “to take us to nowhere on the banjo sound.” In addition to his releases as World Standard, Suzuki has put out three albums under the name Everything Play, and he collaborated with Hosono on the soundtrack to the Japanese film Gu Gu the Cat. Though Suzuki records many of the instruments himself, he also takes advantage of a backing group for live performances that features Hosono’s daughter, Mina.

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Scottish post-punk band Josef K (their name a reference to Kafka’s The Trial) was formed by Paul Haig in 1979. The band was friendly with another Scottish post-punk group, Orange Juice and put out their music out on Orange Juice drummer Alan Horne’s Postcard Records, which also put out releases by The Go-Betweens and Aztec Camera). British music journalist Paul Morley dubbed the two groups, collectively, “the sound of young Scotland.”

“Sorry for Laughing” was released on the band’s only studio album, The Only Fun in Town. A year before they disbanded in 1982, the band recorded a Peel session, and Domino put out a best of/rarities compilation in 2006.

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Mark Fry, born in Essex in 1952, began art school in Florence at the turn of the ’70s. There he met RCA Italiana record producer Vincenzo Micocci, who signed him to the label’s IT subsidiary. His debut LP, Dreaming with Alice, was recorded in Rome during the summer of 1971. That fall, after touring with Lucio Dalla, Fry returned to England, where he continued working in music for a time without much success. In the years since, he’s become known as a painter, and Dreaming with Alice has (justifiably) developed kind of a cult; original pressings have sold at auction for over $3000. Perhaps emboldened by Sunbeam‘s 2007 reissue of the album, Fry finally recorded its follow-up, Shoot the Moon, which saw release in 2008. In 2011, he collaborated with The A. Lords to record I Lived in Trees.

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“Africa” first saw release on Le Lu\Lu’s 1985 cassette Operating on Specific Cues. The next year, it comprised the A-side of a 12″ release by the group, as well as their side of a split 7″ with Belgian industrial group Bene Gesserit. The position of the slash in the group’s name shifted over the years; allegedly it was meant to give the group a more computerized identity by making their name look like a filename. Towards similar ends, I assume, the group included a track of computer data at the end of the “Africa” 12″. Listeners were instructed to dub the song onto a cassette, then feed the data to a Sinclair ZX Spectrum computer—which, when synced-up with the other track on the B-side, would give you something that looks like this. Since then, Yo Yo, one of the core members of the group, has continued to record as Timekode—but as her website says, “TIMEKODE/DENI is NOT ON FACEBOOK/MYSPACE/TWITTER, so DON`T WASTE YOUR TIME!”

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