1983 in Music

Continuing in our series looking at at each year from the decade that shaped electronic music perhaps more than any other, we arrive at 1983, a huge year not only in terms of albums and singles released but also in terms of technology. There’s a lot to unpack here so let’s get going. Playlist from the year below:

1983 saw debuts from Madonna, Pantera, Cybotron, Whodini, Big Country, Metallica, Wham!, Marcus Miller, Pulp (believe it or not), The System and Katrina and the Waves. It saw albums by The Stranglers, Thompson Twins, The Police and Eurythmics as well as massive singles by The Eurythmics (below), Frankie Goes to Hollywood, New Order, Yes, Bowie and Talking Heads.

Blue Monday

There are a few huge records from 1983 but it would be remiss of me not to mention Blue Monday. New Order were a band formed out of the ashes of Joy Division. They’d had some moderate success before but Blue Monday changed everything. The song starts with an unmistakeable DMX drum machine pattern with rapid re-triggering of the kick, something not easily obtainable by real drummers. It has a hypnotic synth ostinato and synthetic vocal choir pads. There’s barely much guitar in there at all.

Blue Monday was not the first but certainly one of the most instrumental records in terms of changing the format of singles from 7″ to 12″. Pressing single songs on to 12″ vinyl allowed not only for longer mixes (which lent themselves more to being played by beat-mixing DJs for weary dancers) but also allowed for louder volumes during mastering. Plenty has already been written about this song, so I’ll leave it to Warren Huart to summarise:

MIDI and the Yamaha DX7

Perhaps the single most important development in music technology since sound-on-sound recording, MIDI, saw the light of day in 1983, and it became implemented across various important synthesiser and keyboards, which led to huge developments in how bands could use these instruments.

An acronym for Musical Instrument Digital Interface, MIDI was the brainchild of Ikutaro Kakehashi of Roland, Tom Oberheim and Dave Smith of Sequential Circuits. Designed to standardise communication between keyboards of different manufacturers but it did so much more.

It’s hard to imagine exactly how electronic and dance music might have evolved without MIDI, perhaps something would have taken its place instead, but MIDI took the synthesiser world by storm. With the relatively low cost of microchips in the 1980s, synth manufactures took advantage of the perfect storm.

Previously, synthesisers were mostly analog, meaning they were heavy, unstable, polyphony was expensive, they required maintenance and saving presets or touch sensitivity was something only afforded to beats like the CS80.

The Yamaha DX7 (and to a lesser degree the DX1) were two game changing synthesisers released in 1983. The DX7 offered velocity sensitivity, patch storage and a tonne of ready made sounds. For touring synth bands this must have felt like a breath of fresh air.

House

Around the early ’80s there was a real melting pot of sounds. Like hip hop, house music could have its own anthology about the creation of it. In short, The Warehouse in Chicago, home to such residents as Frankie Knuckles began experimenting with their DJing style, repurposing extended disco edits. Like hip hop producer finding “the break” and looping it for dancing and rapping, the choruses or instrumental section in disco records could be spliced together and layered with drum machines to create new versions.

The sound would spend years being refined in clubs across America for years before being exported across the world as the global phenomena we now know it as.

Larry Levan’s work as a producer, working with tape multi-tracks and combining techniques imported from dub reggae such as dynamic track rearrangement with mutes and solos and spacious tape echo effects combined with some of the hi-NRG italo disco sound coming out of central Europe, in particular Italy. The crossover between italo, dub, re-edits and post-disco came together to create house music. Below is Carol William’s Can’t Get Away (From Your Love). Compare the original (1982) with Levan’s re-edit (1883). It takes blatant influence from dub’s minimal and freeform arrangements and liberal use of effects:

Owner of a Lonely Heart

Progressive outfit Yes wrote and recorded Owner of a Lonely Heart in 1983. The song was producer by Trevor Horn who in the same year setup ZTT Records who were responsible for Art of Noise and Frankie Goes to Hollywood, among others. Trevor was very much at the forefront of giant samplers such as the Synclavier and Fairlight (the latter used extensibly in this track).

The Fairlight CMI was what sampling what done with long before Akai and E-mu made compact samplers affordable by amateur musicians.

Keep Roland Roland Roland Roll…

While more legendary poly synths hit the market in 1983 including the Oberheim OB-8, Roland Jupiter-6 and JX-3P, it was another Roland creation that shaped the future of music, that was The SH-101.

A lightweight monophonic synth offering square, pulse (with variable PWM), saw and noise oscillators into a 24 dB/octave lowpass filter. The ‘101 wasn’t included with MIDI so users had to use CV and gate to trigger it, but MIDI could be retrofitted with some modifications. It has some of the snappiest envelopes and a built in arpeggiator/sequencer, which made it perfect for making bass lines. Here’s bootlegger extraordinaire Richard X showing us how it’s done:

E-mu Drumulator

Perhaps not the first drum machine that comes to everyone’s mind when we think of the classics but the E-mu Drumulator certainly deserves a place on this list. Overshadowed by the DMX, 808, 909 and Linn (which it was cheaper than) but is still responsible for some classic records.