This compilation has been in the making for about two years. I first heard Coldwave whilst making an album with my old band The Violets. Our producer Al O’Connell played us some obscure tracks that he’d been given by the French DJ and producer Ivan Smagghe who founded the industrial post-punk EBM group Black Strobe.
These songs had an immediate influence on our recordings, they hinted at groups like DAF that we were already into but there was a fragile and beautiful elegance about these songs that I became intrigued by. Primitive synths, Boss DR-55 drum machines and seductive French accents. Most of these bands released just one record, usually a single limited to a few hundred copies, before breaking up and fading into the deep backwater of discogs and ebay, survived only by an iconic black and white photo and three songs on a cassette tape.
I obsessed over these bands for months before it occurred to me that it might be possible to get them all together for a release that might grant them the recognition they never received the first time round. My favourite song to begin with was the track Polaroid/Roman/Photo by Ruth, an impossibly sexy soiree of horns, synths and a polaroid camera. I decided first to go to Paris and find Ruth in the hope that they would be the key to finding everyone else…

tbc…