those little aliens & this little alien: recordings 1980-1981

Recordings 1980-1981 is a compilation featuring Those Little Aliens & This Little Alien. There are several components that would contribute to what would become Those Little Aliens & This Little Aliens and the zine/labels Flowmotion, Image 341 and Un-Ltd Abilities, all run by British DIY protagonists Ian Dobson and Gordon Hope. The first of these came with the advent of punk and especially the "Anarchy Tour" which made its much-delayed debut in their home town of Leeds in December 1976 and introduced Ian Dobson to a scene that threw him into wholeheartedly as a seventeen year old looking for something different. With the "anybody can do it" ethos in mind, he invested in a cheap electric guitar and a drum kit. As the 1-2-3 of punk became either increasingly repetitive or commercialized, the drum kit was sold and the guitar was left to gather dust until early 1978, when an unlikely meeting in a record store with an intriguing sounding album in an almost plain white sleeve would turn Dobson's preconceptions of what music should be on its head. That album, Throbbing Gristle's The Second Annual Report (IRL 001CD/LP, 1977), seemed to dispense with the ethos of "This is a chord, this is another, this is a third. Now form a band" altogether and suggested that those strange noises from a guitar were worth exploring. The advent of affordable monophonic/duophonic synths that didn't take up an entire room was also important. The recordings collected here using the Korg MS20, the Octave Cat, the legendary, but somewhat troublesome Wasp as well as the Korg SQ10 sequencer and the Boss Dr. Rhythm DR55. Recording was via a Tandberg 10x10 stereo recorder, Teac A108 Sync cassette deck through a Tensai 2030 amp, apart from the three compilation tracks which were recorded at the wonderful Colin Potter's, a 4-track studio near York. All of this would have travelled no further than a bedroom in Harehills, Leeds without the humble compact audio cassette which, via a process known as "Magnitizdat", popularized by non-government approved bands in Soviet Russia, enabled the recopying and distribution of music for a minimal outlay, usually just a blank cassette, and stamps for the return postage. This release features the aforementioned compilation tracks along with tracks from the cassette releases Incident in Moderan (1980), Variable (1980) and Synthesizer Specialist (1980). Limited edition of 444. Includes hand-numbered certificate.