Alright synth pop fans! We've covered popular songs and compilation albums so far on Synth Pop Saturdays or as one commenter put it:
Stupid bargain collections of the same old dime-a-dozen tracks we already bought two, three, four or more times before.
We feel you. On today's edition of Synth Pop Saturday, we're digging a little deeper and expanding our horizons (and maybe yours as well) by covering the four Cherry Red Records compilations known as MUSIK MUSIC MUSIQUE. Each volume covers a single year in the early development of synth pop music, with more than 50 tracks across three compact discs. Each set has an informative booklet featuring detailed liner notes, images of the original record sleeves & labels, and photos of the artists. For those collectors who enjoy a dose of knowledge, a peek behind the studio curtain, or just something pretty to look at while they listen to their new CDs of old music, this set has you covered. These tracks sound pretty dang good for their age and, in some cases, the primitive conditions they were recorded in. I think that to be as definitive as possible, some compromises were made in song selection and sound quality. The series gets its name from a vocoder-heavy Zeus B. Held track found in the first collection, focusing on 1980.
Covering 1980 with half a dozen tracks from 1979 and an outlier from January 1981, the first volume of Musik Music Musique is subtitled The Dawn Of Synth Pop and features 58 songs. (The cover art above was provided by Cherry Red Records on their website - the actual cover art as released in 2020 can be viewed HERE.) The label site says the set features:
A TREASURE TROVE OF HOUSEHOLD NAMES... AND UNDERGROUND FIGUREHEADS... ALONGSIDE FORGOTTEN GEMS AND LESSER-KNOWN CURIOS.
And to add an air of authenticity and perhaps authority, they're quick to let you know you're in good hands because the set is:
BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE TEAM BEHIND THE CRITICAL AND COMMERCIAL HITS ‘CLOSE TO THE NOISE FLOOR’ AND ‘ELECTRICAL LANGUAGE’!
A quick glance at the tracklisting let me know I knew (much) less than half of the artists featured, and I didn't recognize most of the track titles from those (few) familiar names. Rather than listen to Musik Music Musique all in one sitting, I listened to one 75+ minute disc every other day, using the day in between to cleanse my palate and be as fresh and receptive as possible for the next disc.
According to my notes (now an essential part of my critical listening, as fleeting thoughts and critical or complimentary comments are lost to the ether otherwise), there were three tracks I did not recognize by title, but once I heard them, my familiarity with them was evident. Good job, brain! Some of these songs sound like bold and revelatory envelope-pushing compositions, while others have more of a primitive or abstract experimental quality to them, as if the artist was merely exploring what their new instruments could do. A handful of tracks sound like bad novelty songs I need never hear again. Of the three discs, Disc Two was my favorite with a lower-end ⭐⭐⭐ while Discs One and Three get a total of ⭐⭐⭐ between them. We deal in a six-star rating system here at The Hideaway, so overall, we're giving Musik Music Musique ⭐⭐½ just based solely on the music within. If we were ones to judge packaging and presentation in addition to audio, we'd bump it up to a full ⭐⭐⭐ and, if polled, we'd prefer a neon blue color to the sickening green that was used.
Released in 2021, Musik Music Musique 2.0 gets the tag 1981 | The Rise of Synth Pop for its 51 songs. This time around, the label uses less hyperbole ("PACKED WITH FAMILIAR CLASSICS AND LESSER KNOWN GEMS.") In short, everything that was good about the first volume in the series is a little better this time around. Same smart packaging but a better signature color for this listener's taste. Many artists carry over, but this time they're represented by tracks I'm actually familiar with and, more importantly, actually enjoy.
Employing the same one-day-on, one-day-off listening technique as last time, I enjoyed the three discs in MMM 2.0 by a fraction above their counterparts in the previous collection. There are fewer songs overall, so the discs were slightly less of an assignment or chore, with a greater number of both exemplary and experimental tracks, along with fewer songs that need never be heard again. An interesting development was that after making it through the three discs, I spent between an hour and an hour and a half looking up some of the songs I liked from my notes to find their original format (album tracks? singles? b-sides?) and then listened again to some of the songs in their original context. Another thing my brain did this time was try to figure out who was missing or who would have been in the mix if I ruled the world. I narrowed it down to New Order and Simple Minds, both of which I kinda sorta referenced in the previous sentence. Oh, and big-time Human League after they split with the Heaven 17 boys and had one of the biggest albums ever. Don't you dare forget The Human League! Disc One of MMM 2.0 gets a strong ⭐⭐⭐. Disc Two comes in with ⭐⭐ and Disc Three squeaks out ⭐⭐½. The whole shebang gets ⭐⭐¾. The MVP of the first two collections is New Musik. Will they go three for three?
The third collection focuses on tracks from our favorite year in music, 1982. Released in 2023, Musik Music Musique 3.0 is subtitled Synth Pop On The Air. By now, the label is calling the whole series HUGELY SUCCESSFUL, but we don't know what criteria they're using. There are 56 tracks from
"...COUNTLESS...ELECTRONIC LUMINARIES..."
(Not to brag, but I did count all the way to 100 just the other day with the grandkids as we counted how many colors there were in their new watercolor set) including a few of our all-time favorites from Tears For Fears (kinda), New Order, and Heaven 17. And don't forget the R-rated delights worthy of being wrapped in brown paper sleeves from Soft Cell and Berlin. (Apologies to Those French Girls.)
My new listening regimen is gonna work out fine, though if crunched for time, I might do a disc in the morning and a disc in the evening, using the afternoon to get distracted and reset. I'll save us all some time and toil (too late?) and share that each disc scored ⭐⭐⭐, so Musik Music Musique 3.0 gets the best rating yet with a ⭐⭐⭐. Did I say "yet"? Yup, Cherry Red Records says there are discs already in the pipeline for 1983 and 1984. No New Musik on MMM 3.0. Maybe they reached too far by covering The Beatles on their 1982 release, Warp. The MVP Award will stay on the shelf this time, but you know which band name stood out to me purely for 2024 reasons? Yup, Ukraine. They released four songs total over two singles. One single in 1981 and another in 1982.
Early synth pop from the late Seventies can be fun to listen to as you hear the evolution of the synths and drum machines as the artists learn how to use them. Disc One started off fun and enjoyable until the German disco track at number eighteen crashed the party. Try as they might, the final two songs could not get things back on track; the spell was broken. ⭐⭐⭐½. It would be easy to write many of these tracks off as novelty numbers rather than recognizing their place in the history of the electronic genre, but sometimes they are just derivative, as if the artists couldn't get past the factory settings on their devices. Disco Two starts off well but is not as consistent as the first disc. Track eleven was awkward to listen to on several levels, though the After The Fire and Mi-Sex tracks did bring the level of enjoyment up a bit. ⭐⭐⭐. Disc Three creates an illusion of quality by spreading enjoyable tracks throughout the disc rather than front-loading them, though in the end its probably the second-best disc in the set. There is a favored three-song run from our heroes, New Musik, through a remixed John Foxx track.⭐⭐⭐½. We're giving Musik Music Musique 1979 ⭐⭐⭐¼ as we await the next collection in the series.
In January 2026, Cherry Pop released the fourth volume in the Musik Music Musique series, going back to the roots of synth pop in 1979. Take a look at the artists listed on the cover art. Then take a breath and know that this collection may not feature the first song that pops into your head for each of those artists. Love the blue used throughout the set, even on the discs themselves. I clocked artists from the UK, the United States, France, and Germany, but I may have missed other artist homelands. Likewise, most of the songs were released in 1979, though a few might have been released in 1980. To review this sixty-song collection, I listened to one disc a week for three consecutive weeks, then went back and revisited a few favorites after the final twenty songs on Disc Three.
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