An example of what I call "the rhetorics of temporality" - the way critics compulsively position and reposition things they like, or are unimpressed by, using temporal coordinates, a reshuffling of past / present / future, with each term given a different intensity or value-measure, depending on the argument
Around this time, I - and Paul too - would celebrate acid house for its flashback echo of a lost future of the early Eighties (DAF, Liaisons Dangereuses, etc), a future then only 7 years in the rear-view mirror
This track by Chris & Cosey fascinates me in particular, because it falls into a kind of temporal no man's land.... It's described at YouTube accurately as proto-acid house - but at the time of release (1984), it might have conceivably felt dated (since you wouldn't have known it was proto anything).
It's a great track obviously - made even better by the title, "Dancing Ghosts"
But I seem to remember reviewing a Chris & Cosey album in my first year at Melody Maker and feeling like they were a bit behind the times, still banging on with the breathy darkly erotic synthpop a a la Hardcorps...
"Je Suis Passee" - Regine the singer said the song was about feeling like a ghost, as it happens
Hardcorps had a smidge of critical buzz but suffered from happening just when guitars were in the re-ascendance. If they had stuck it out until New Beat happened...
But going back to something else Belgian - Telex - I think they must have always sounded a bit thin and corny, even when "bang up to date"
A Telex machine itself is now an outmoded mode of telecommunication
