ES7131 seven-inch features Various Artists
‘Cold War Electronica’ Double CD
This month’s Reader Offer is an exclusive double CD bringing together 35 tracks inspired by or related to the Cold War, the subject of this month’s composite cover feature. Taking in coldwave, minimal synth, post-punk, industrial, dark ambient and more, be prepared for lots of tension, paranoia, nuclear anxiety and big helpings of both doom and gloom. The graphic on the front of the CD, by the way, shows the blast radius of a Soviet R-12 Dvina ballistic missile if it landed on the Electronic Sound office.
The first disc has 19 tracks from the 1980s, when the Cold War was dramatically heating up and the price of synths was coming down. The majority of the artists are British and include the likes of Bill Nelson, 23 Skidoo, Caroline K, Oppenheimer Analysis, Section 25 and Cultural Amnesia, but we also have five tracks from East Berlin’s fascinating “walled in” scene. Most of these originally appeared on extremely limited edition cassettes, in one case so limited that only 30 copies were made.
The second disc covers the period from 2017 to 2025, our starting point being the year that international news magazines such as Newsweek and Politico first wrote about a new Cold War. The 16 contributors include UK artists like Veryan, Concretism and Polypores, as well as Sonologyst (Italy), Desinteresse (the Netherlands), Night In Athens (Greece via London) and other names from France, Germany, Poland, Hungary, Belarus, the US and Australia. We also have Ukrainian cyberpunk duo BlazerJacket, whose ’Nuclear Dust’ is inspired by the Russian invasion of their country. “The war tried to silence it,” they say. “But the idea survived… like we did.”
