New Zealand electro from 1984 – Sidewalk City by Snap

The events been really coming together over the last few weeks, we’ve been meeting some great artists who want to be involved in the day and getting all the production arranged for the day. I met with Tom Ludvigson a few days ago to discuss the event and see if he’d like to be involved. Tom been a synth man for about 30 years and has been involved in many Auckland bands as a player and composer, head over to his site Jazzscores for more on Tom’s musical projects.

We were discussing the synth scene in the early 80′s, as this was when I first got in to hiphop and electro back in the UK, Tom remembered working on a track under the name “Snap” called “Sidewalk City” which Tom said had been influenced by the early electro coming out of the states at the time. I was aware of bands like Car Crash set which seemed to be influenced more by the darker side of synth music at the time and wasn’t aware of any US influenced electro coming out of NZ from the early 80′s, I had to hear it.

After a quick question on twitter a serious music fiend, Peter Mac sent me a rip of the track from his vinyl copy. I’ve gotta say that the track blew me away as I’d never heard this sound coming out of NZ from 1984. Check it out, it’s over 6 minutes and really builds with layers of synths, vocals and an mc vocal which drops at 3.44!

I thought I’d ask Tom for any recollections of the session as I’m fascinated by all the elements which make up the track, particularly the mc vocal and the layers of synths and techniques used in the production.

“Recalling the session, recorded to 24track tape at Harlequin Studios, a few things stick out:

• The musicality of the “Triangle” production team of Graeme Gash, Paul Streekstra and Noel Connolly;
• The experimental the-studio-as-an-instrument approach;
• The trial-and-error art of overdubbing Polysix arpeggiator lines in sync with the track without the benefit of hard sync: first tweak the arpeggiator tempo knob until it sounds right, then trigger it exactly on time, every time. It worked with repeated drop-ins…;
• Borrowing a just-released Oberheim OB-X polysynth to do state-of-the-art sounding overdubs for the extended dance mix;
• Four of us jamming the extended dance mix at the 24-track console, eight hands together tweaking sliders and delay buttons for a dubby atmospheric mix.”

Let me know what you think of the track by leaving a comment, I’d love to know what you think. I’ll be adding more tracks from different NZ synth artists over the next few weeks and of course bringing you more news on the event as it comes in.