Minimal Wave

What it is

A Korg MS-20 bought on hire purchase, a Boss DR-55 and a TEAC four-track, in a bedroom in Enschede or Lyon or Sheffield. The records were pressed in tiny numbers between 1979 and 1983 and then disappeared, and the name arrived twenty-five years late: Veronica Vasicka started the Minimal Wave label in 2005 and the term attached itself to a scene that had never used it. The music is what happens when your drum machine has eight presets and you pick one. Rhythms are thin and unswung, the chords stay put for four minutes, and the vocal is one person standing much too close to a cheap microphone. It sits between coldwave and EBM without being either. Colder than the first, and far too polite to be the second.

What it sounds like

Small. Everything is one voice wide, because a four-track has four tracks and two of them are already gone. The drum machine is an analogue preset box, so the kick is a short thud with no sub, the rimshot is a click, and the hats are white noise through a fixed envelope that never changes length. Synths are single oscillator, usually an MS-20 or a Juno-6, with the filter parked and the resonance up. The bass is the same synth an octave down. Reverb comes from a spring or from nothing, and the tape hiss is audible on every reissue because it was audible on the master.

Key elements

• A preset rhythm boxDR-55, CR-78, Korg Mini Pops. The patterns were built into the machine, so half the records in this scene share a rhythm nobody programmed.
• Rimshot instead of snareA short woodblock-like click on 2 and 4. It carries no body at all, so the arrangements can stay this quiet without collapsing.
• One synth, two jobsThe same monosynth plays the bassline and then the lead an octave up, because there was only ever one synth. Patches change mid-track by hand.
• Deadpan vocalSpoken or half-sung, close-miked, dry, often in accented English or in Dutch, French or German. No doubling and no harmony.
• Four-track bounceTracks get combined to free up space, so drums and bass are welded together on one channel and cannot be separated later. That commitment is audible.

How to get them

• DrumsUse an analogue rhythm box emulation rather than samples, pick a preset and leave it. If you must program it, keep it to kick, rim, one hat sound and one shaker, and change nothing across the track.
• SynthOne oscillator, sawtooth, into a 12dB low-pass at about 1.2kHz with resonance around 40 percent. No unison, no detune, no chorus except the one built into a Juno.
• BassThe same patch two octaves down with the filter closed to 300Hz, playing eighths on the root and the fifth. Record it in one pass and keep the fluffed note.
• Bounce it downSum the drums and bass to a single mono track early and mix the rest against that. It forces the balance decisions you would otherwise defer forever.
• Tape and pitchPrint to cassette, then vary the speed by half a percent across the track. That slow drift is the single most identifiable thing about these reissues.
• Keep it shortThree minutes, one section, one change. If you find yourself writing a bridge you have left the genre and arrived somewhere near synthpop.

Reference points

Das Ding, Oppenheimer Analysis, Solid Space, Martin Dupont, Nine Circles, Linear Movement, and the Minimal Wave and Dark Entries reissue labels. Reference points for the sound rather than endorsements.