INCUNABLES [Old Music 1980 - 1993] (Open 23h)
Una noche dedicada a recordar locales como Attica, Saratoga, Xcandalo, Cobre, Voltereta (Cubos), Laberinto, Planta Baja, Nacional III, New World, Casi Casi, etc
EBM / Synthpop / New Beat / Gothrock / Sonido de Valencia / OldTechno
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"OldTechno" - you gotta love the truth-in-advertising here!
But they're not talking about techno as it's now known, they are talking about early Eighties synthpop
This night of technostalgia - which took place in March 2026 - harks back to a time when the Spain was one of the most (musically) electronophiliac nations on the planet, right up there with Japan
Hence Spain's very early claim on the term "techno" itself
That's 1981!
Only Yellow Magic Orchestra and Japanese techno-pop have ever-so-slightly earlier fingerprints
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In the Eighties, I used to know a chap called Lawrence Hughes, who was - if memory serves - some kind of "independent scholar" but who also occasionally played in a band called A Popular History of Signs when they toured on the Continent. They weren't really even at cult band level in the U.K. but they had a following in Spain. He told me they would play in discotheques and clubs there. And that there was a vibrant electropop oriented scene.
Talk about retro-modernism, that is quite an early use of the Rodchenko shouting Bolshevik woman there.
Then much later someone else told me about how there had been a kind of proto-rave scene in Spain in the Eighties, after Franco but well before acid house and UK rave took off. Dancing all-night to electronic music, driving between clubs in different towns, drugs... The orientation was more EBM and synthpop than club tracks as we in the UK would have understood it (i.e. mostly black music and mostly coming from America and above all New York). I seem to remember there was notoriety because sleep-deprived kids would be falling asleep at the wheel and driving their cars off roads during the long weekends of partying. Lots of alarmist coverage on TV and in the newspapers.
But I might be garbling this and memory-blending stories I learned about a later '90s scene in Valencia and its surrounding areas, based around the hard dance sound of bakalao.
Then again that scene has roots going back to the early 1980s. Indeed in the nostalgia night Incunabla at the top, one of the genres on offer is "Sonido de Valencia".
The teenage daughter of a professor (who'd had me come over to talk about rave) told me all about it - I remember her talking about the aggressive dancing and the distinct style of clothing (a mix of black and white, if I recall right). And how people would be up for nights in a row.
Ah well there is a whole Wikipedia entry devoted to it:
The Ruta del Bakalao (literally 'route of the cod'), also known as Ruta Destroy or La Ruta, was a massive socio-cultural and musical movement centered in the Valencian Community between the early 1980s and mid-1990s. It represented the first large-scale clubbing phenomenon in Spain, involving a 30-kilometer circuit of discotheques along the CV-500 highway (El Saler road) that operated continuously from Friday to Monday.
The music was named after salted cod, which I took to carry some kind of connotation of pungency as well as regional identity and possibly also class identity - so perhaps similar to cheesy as a negative turned positive. But maybe not. My attempts to find the music in Valencia led me only to a CD compilation. Which did resemble happy hardcore (lots of detourned chartpop hooks) but was a bit too Dairylea as opposed to, say, Tronchón.
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A few years back Bonjo Joe, the salvage label, put out a couple of compilations of Spanish synthpop and ambient from the Eighties and early Nineties:
LA CONTRA OLA Synth Wave & Post Punk from Spain 1980-86
LA OLA INTERIOR Ambient & Acid Exoticism in Spain 1983-90
"Following “La Contra Ola” (BJR015), Bongo Joe is pleased to present LA OLA INTERIOR, a compilation exploring the ambient side of the Spanish electronic music produced in the 80’s. It gathers musicians from various horizons and of many generations, who shared the desire to create an immersive soundscape and to combine electronic music with non-Western musical traditions. As a general rule, the Anglo-Saxon tropism did relate the spanish peninsula’s ambient music to the Balearic Sound, that is to say to the relaxing music played in Ibiza’s nightclubs. But this music takes place in the productive territory of experimental musics, and particularly in its two main breeding grounds: the tape recording underground and the independent musicians-producers scene.
"Inseparable from the processes of self-publishing, distribution and exchange of music that were then taking place in Spain in an artisanal way, the vast underground movement of cassettes was divided between an "ethno-trance" combining industrial beats and oriental sounds on the one hand (Esplendor Geométrico, Miguel A. Ruiz / Orfeón Gagarin) and unclassifiable low-fi tinkerers on the other hand (Camino al desván, Eli Gras, Mataparda, Victor Nubla). Hyperactive, this scene is radical and strongly dominated by the hardest musical styles, but the ambient, influenced by the German Kosmische Musik and "krautrock", also develops here.
"The second vein of Spanish ambient comes from some of the independent labels of the peninsula (DRO, GASA, El Cometa de Madrid, EGK) whose activity will mark the return of some of the most adventurous musicians-producers of the 70s. Some were influenced by American minimalism (Luis Delgado / Mecánica Popular, Suso Saiz, Javier Segura), others by Fourth-World Music conceived by Jon Hassell and Brian Eno (Finis Africae, Jabir). Having passed through folk, ancient, traditional or contemporary music, and being familiar with improvisation and studio techniques, these artists come from a mutant hippie culture, capable of phagocyting many musical styles from electronic ambient to ethnic improvisation and modal jazz.
"These two scenes and generations that make up LA OLA INTERIOR intersect around a common interest in non-Western musical traditions. Their exploration may be that of the tribal origins of electronic rhythms or the Arab heritage of Spain. Above all, it is a dreamy exoticism, an immobile journey as the sounds, rhythms or instruments of these traditions are scrutinized by Western practices (avant-garde music, electronic technology). The result is a hybrid music, filtered and reinvented, neither Western nor extra-Western, with a pronounced taste for the fusion of opposites, which we have called "Acid Exoticism" because of its permanent search for trance or contemplation. Atmospheric, contemplative and serial, these musics still plunge us today into a sensorial journey, at the same time interior and distant, organic and technological, between exotic reminiscences and interior visions.
"LA OLA INTERIOR brings together 20 little-known and innovative pieces from the golden age of Spanish electronic music."
