Various Artists — Uneven Paths, Deviant Pop From Europe 1980​-​1991

My vinyl collection

I haven’t spoken about our vinyl collection here before. Correction, it isn’t so much a vinyl collection as it is a small assortment of vinyls. One of the most intriguing among them is Uneven Paths: Deviant Pop From Europe 1980​-​1991. 

Compilations like Uneven Paths are intended to be a snapshot into a time and place one didn’t know existed, but suspected might have. After all, thanks to punk and the development of more accessible analogue recording equipment, the eighties saw an explosion of underground DIY music. More often that not, this explosion is associated with a flood of punk-influenced acts from America, most famously Black Flag and the roster on the Black Flag-founded SST Records (immortalised in the wonderful Michael Azerrad book, Our Band Could Be You Life, one of the best music books I’ve ever read). There’s no reason, one would suspect, that only American boys on guitars and drums would exploit easily accessible recording technologies to make experimental records in self-funded studios. I mean, isn’t that how hip hop started? One would suspect there’d have been thousands of people across continents and genres doing the same thing. This record proves that guess right.

DIY music in the 80s

Uneven Paths collects a set of forgotten B-sides, singles, and experimental recordings from a bunch of lesser-known European artists of the eighties. All these songs seemingly pose the same question about three decades later: what if this is what pop music from the eighties sounded like? What if it sounded like an understated drum machine, echoing guitars, and a bossa nova groove, like on No Lie by John Makin & Friends? What if it was African tribalism through a pop lens, like on Miko & Mubake’s Komoma Ya-Ya-Ya? What if it sounded like the lush reverb-pop of Violet Eves’ Listen Over The Ocean? Or the infectious leftfield dance of Vanakos’ I Hate Disco… Not the Dance?

Cratedigging and gatekeeping

I suppose one of the main draws of collecting vinyls (or cratedigging) is coming across a record like this one in a record store in the corner of some unexpected place. Walking into a booth and listening to the first few minutes of it and nodding yes, yes please. The social act of staring at an album cover, unsure of whether to buy it, when an older bespectacled man, a translator at a local university, walks up to you and says, I’d recommend Tom Zé’s self-titled album over this one; I think they have it. To have your scepticism met with, look, just trust me and get it. I’m neither a vinyl purist nor a romantic, but I must admit, there’s a real draw to the experience of going to a record store and getting your hands on a record you have to wait to get back home to discover. In an era where most music one discovers is recommended by some faceless person on the internet (hi there!), followed by a google search, followed by checking it out on Spotify a few seconds later, the combination of trusting your instinct, embracing uncertainty, and deliberating quietly that comes with vinyl hunting is a wonderful, if rare experience. 

I think it’s essential for me to provide a counterbalance to the romanticism of the previous sentence. I don’t see vinyls as being essential to a modern-day listener’s experience. Vinyls are expensive. A good record player is expensive. Good audio equipment is expensive. And the sound of analogue? Yes, it’s slightly different from the sound of digital playback, but anyone who says there’s a significantly perceptible difference between the two is, in my humble opinion, lying. Or at the very least, overstating. I’m always suspicious of gatekeepers, and in the case of something that should be both easily accessible and deeply personal, like music, I find that sort of elitism to be deeply distasteful. So please don’t see this article as the inane ramblings of a heavyset geek telling you that if you aren’t listening to vinyls then you aren’t listening to music at all. Just see it as a heavyset geek telling you the story of how he discovered this amazing album in a record store a year or so ago.