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After 20 years, Gary decided he wanted to do something different. He bought a $100 Yamaha PSR keyboard, complete with autochord and drum machine, and began to experiment with writing in new ways. Rather than having conventional song structure, the music was more open. The words were sometimes spoken, and sometimes sung. Gary also began writing poems and vignettes to include in his performances. While these songs were not as overtly political as his folk-style songs, they commented on life in the 80s with a uniquely cynical Baltimore view. (Many thought Gary was influenced by Baltimore filmmaker John Waters, especially given Gary's love of pink flamingos, but Waters was not an influence on the music.) Gary began to search out other performers to help him bring this material to the stage; at the same time he started working with producer Erik Steensen to create a recording of the music along with some of the spoken word pieces. The album, Original Soundtrack, was released about the time Gary did his first performance with The Generic Art Ensemble.

This reissue includes insert with complete biography and track-by-track notes by Gary Blanchard himself. Front cover artwork hand pasted on sleeve.

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Together their songs range from a dreamy, soft sound to harder driving pop songs. Sally's vocals are layered in a harmony of different sounds and melodies over László's fretless, bass driven music.

Their debut EP Never Enough was released on December 14th, 2015, on Domestica Records. It featured an extended version of their most popular dream-pop song "All the People" to contrast the more chilling cold song versions of "Never Enough".

Their full-length album Play With Lies will be out on June 14th, 2016, on Domestica Records. The album continues to feature sad, dream-pop songs such as "Call My Name" while also containing some straight up pop tracks such as "Play With Lies" and "Talk to Me".

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All the tracks were originally self-released as demo tapes in a very limited run. Their first work, Coming Home, was published in 1983, and the second one, Too Many Lies, in 1984. Both of them were distributed by the band themselves. Shortly after, they released a more widely known 12" EP, Tired (Nova Express, 1984), with a different line-up and noticeably more rock-oriented.

Definers of a totally genuine sound, Hymn were coevals to the underground-synth-post-punk movement that surfaced in France in the early Eighties, easily recognisable today via cult labels such as Bain Total and Invisible/Scopa Records, with stunning releases by experimental references like Ilitch, Philippe Doray or Incontinents.

Liner Notes by Bap Bandiera:
" So... "Hymn" jumped out of my brain when I was about 20... I needed to sing songs to forget my family problems... At that point there were only two of us: Stefan Dalloz and me... our sessions were simple and we easily found a way of communicating through our music... smoking and drinking + heroin, speed , mushrooms and LSD... fighting Society and thinking of Revolutions! But Stef was a kind of Syd Barrett-cum-Syd Vicious type. He was on a permanent trip and decided to quit... then I asked Tony Bulfoni, with whom I shared a lot of quick pieces always in relation with our life and love experiences. We were such a romantic duo... Lucas Trouble joined us after a few months and his synth psalmodies became part of "Hymn", but he was not on our trip because he was more interested in business... "Hymn" was our screaming Way Out to blow away our sadness and No Future attitude... our influences were Joy Division, PiL, The Residents, Bauhaus, Siouxsie, Television, Talking Heads, Magazine, Killing Joke, Wire, XTC... and a lot of bands from our cold generation... "

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Moloko + with its singer Martin Holm gave great concerts and got a well known name in the scene in Southern Germany. TV, Radio and the press followed closely the rise of the band from Landshut. The 1986 published first record is still an admirable jewel and should not be missed on any searching list. They got prepared to record a second album when "suddenly a comet burned out, near the sun, on distant skys".

"In meinen Taschen die Sterne wie Staub" (Translation: In my pockets the stars like dust) - The song from the first album and our thoughts are dedicated to our leadsinger Martin Holm, who left our world much to early.

Mastered 2014 by Yves Roussel.
Edition of 400 numbered copies. Hand printed with photoengraving (each cover is different). Comes with DIN A3-sized poster printed double sided.

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Joaquín starts making electronic music in 1999. Influenced by the EBM, techno and electro-punk scene from the late 90's he uses the newly bought MPC sampler to make his first tracks.

Around 2002 he begins producing cuts, remixing and playing live gigs under the name TBN202, in 2004 edits his first Ep vinyl "Fingernails" under his own label No-Domain Recordings.

After some years away from the machines and focusing on his professional graphic-videomaking work, Joaquín retakes music production in 2012 giving shape to his new project Pola Tog, an electronic new wave sound based fully on hardware synthesizers and drum machines flavored with electro-EBM-synth-pop-post-punk and automatic dada lyrics.

Joaquin collaborates with Slovenian visual artist Ana Gale, who translates Pola Tog's post-digital miscommunication tunes into a glitchy poetic visual language turning live shows into a crispy, cinematic and dark AV performance.

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The Collapse of Ancient Funk (Vol.1) is a record which gathers all the vocal songs included in the cassette-album 'The Collapse Of Ancient Funk (1984-85 A.D.)', originally edited by Final Image (UK) in 1985.

A brief history of Son Of Sam by Chris Bishop:
" Sometime during 1984, during a period of Orwellian mass unemployment, I moved into a house in Leeds that had a basement filled with the collective equipment of The Cassandra Complex, O Yuki Conjugate and Mr Tom Fazzini. My pathetic contribution was the first Korg drum machine which nobody used and was eventually bought by Jez from Utah Saints. I don't suppose he used it either. It sounded awful.
Music at this time was largely devoted to guitar-oriented production, but the unwitting advantage these people had was our mistrust of the fretboard. Then Electro happened, we got an 808, and Son of Sam was born when I needed a nasty name to scribble on a cassette. As time went on, Razors and Mr Cheese fleshed my meanderings out into a "real band", we played a few dates around Europe, brought out some vinyl on Rouska and then logically destroyed ourselves when Techno arrived.

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Today, we feel particularly proud of announcing that we have rescued from the storehouse of memory all the unpublished demos, a collection of 8 songs recorded between 1981 and 1982 taken directly from the original tapes, in a really luxurious edition.

Each cover hand stamped.

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Transmission is a monthly party dedicated to all the international New New Wave, Post Punk, Cold Wave, Dark Wave scene, celebrated at Antiobiotic Bar in Barcelona since December 2011. Sessions are accurately selected by Dj Sandman, where emerging and unknown bands are really important and also forgotten gems from the underrated 80s scene.

Dj Sandman started his career as dj in the middle 80s, he has performed in the most emblematic clubs in Barcelona and Madrid, and he has also taken part in some important parties happening in Germany, like in the Nachtwerk club (Karlsruhe) or the 17th edition of the Wave Gotik Treffen Festival (Leipzig).

Next June, Transmission session is going to take place at the WGT festival too, we will be waiting for you!

We want to thanks especially to Seacrypt, Madmoizel, Phosphor, Des Âmes Libres, Schonwald, In Death It Ends, Noi Kabát, Más Allá, In A Lonely Place and Xiu and Roger Cuixart (Mastering) for all his support and his great contribution.

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All tracks on this record have been selected from the cassette series Oscar's X-mas Carols, originally released on Christmas Day 1984, 1985 and 1987 by Oscar Smit's imprint Noel Tapes in Holland.

The story behind "X-mas Card From Outer Space" by Oscar Smit himself:

I've had a thing for Christmas music ever since I heard Phil Spector's Christmas Album in the late 1970s. Through the years I've become a massive collector of every genre of Christmas songs. Each year, I can't wait for December, when I can play Christmas music again.

In the 1980s I worked for Vinyl, a Dutch monthly magazine. A lot of music at that time was released on cassettes. A significant number of cassettes were sent to Vinyl, from both the Netherlands and abroad, so many in fact that I began writing a separate column, Dolby, to discuss them. For some years, my Dolby page was a meeting place for fans of cassette music. In addition to Christmas music, I was also a big fan of experimental sounds, and I soon noticed that very little electronic Christmas music was being produced. That's when I got the idea of creating a cassette myself, featuring adventurous and original Christmas numbers. I was in contact with a lot of musicians because of my work at Vinyl, and I invited a large number of them to record a holiday number especially for my Christmas cassette. The production and distribution were in the hands of Ed and Ignit from the Ding Dong label. The first edition of Oscar's X-Mas Carols was released shortly before Christmas 1984, on my own Noel label. I never received any payment or sales figures from Ding Dong, so I have no idea how many copies of that first edition were sold. That's one of the reasons why in 1985 I decided to take on the distribution myself. Plus, I'd just gotten hold of a rubber stamp that was suitable for stamping serial numbers. That gave me the idea of producing a limited-edition, numbered cassette. I'd package the cassette attached to a picture frame containing a beautiful black-and-white photo of my sister's hand, holding some of my parent's Christmas ornaments. My friend Theo Kamphuis not only took the picture, he also had to develop it 350 times, because that was the edition's print run. We spent two evenings assembling the 350 packages, each containing a framed photograph plus a cassette. The artistic-looking result disguised the fact that the project was a financial catastrophe. I barely recouped half of the 4000 guilders in production costs. I had well and truly learned my lesson and decided to stop producing cassettes. However, in 1987 I started to get the itch again, so I invited a large group of international and Dutch artists to send me numbers for my third Christmas cassette. This time, to cut costs, I did everything except the cover design on my own. The cover was mimeographed, and I reproduced the cassettes myself. And so, Is That You Santa Claus? was created, in a limited and numbered edition of 100, made for approximately one-tenth of the production costs of its forerunner.

In 1988 I got a full-time job and had little time for my Christmas label. Subsequently, cassettes lost more and more ground to the encroaching CD format. A fourth cassette would therefore never materialize! It wasn't until 2010 that Oscar's X-mas Carols volume 4 would be released, in the form of a CD entitled Christmas Cover Up. The songs on that CD were covers of not-so-well-known Christmas numbers, performed by such artists as Hunter Complex, Jaap Boots, Eddy de Clercq, and Kaat Hellings. The music, however, was much less experimental than on the cassettes.

Now, in 2017, there's a vinyl version of Oscar's X-mas Carols. For this album's tracklist, its compilers Jordi Serrano and Oscar Smit made a personal selection from the three previous cassettes. In this, they were unfortunately hindered by the limited playing time available on a long-playing record. Of the fifteen tracks on this LP, seven come from the Netherlands. I've remained in contact with many of the original artists and was able to track down the rest on Facebook. Welcome to the digital era. I wish you much listening pleasure with these tracks from the previous, analog century!

Merry X-Mas
Oscar Smit (Music journalist / DJ)

Mastered from the original tapes by Ruud Lekx.
Compiled by Oscar Smit and Jordi Serrano.
Cover painting by Max Kisman.

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