- A lot of Australian music from the pre-internet age is hard to find or even seemingly lost to history, particularly when it comes to alternative and independent artists. So it is always piques my interest when a release appears containing tunes from the '80s or earlier, especially when it covers a range of artists. It is always a thrill to have a chance to listen again to bands and songs that have faded from view, especially when it can be combined with finding out for the first time about other important artists from a previous era. One such release has just appeared. It’s called Closed Circuits – Australian Alternative Electronic Music of the ‘70s and ‘80s, Volume 1.

The album has been compiled by Australian music writer and historian David Nichols. It comes with detailed liner notes and track-by-track commentary, which provides so much extra value to compilations of this type. Discovering new facts about bands or songs always adds to the pleasure of going back in time.

The compilation covers the post-punk period, where the do-it-yourself ethos of the time combined with the figure-it-out-as-you-go-along necessity of exploring producing sounds out of the newly appearing array of electronic instruments.

My only quibble with the collection is that it consists mostly of artists from Sydney, Melbourne and Perth, so there is little representation of artists in other parts of the country that were also exploring the development of electronic equipment and sounds content in that era. However, the fact that this collection is labelled as “Volume 1” gives hope that more historical gems will be brought forward in the near future.

While the album’s twenty tracks all nominally fit under the label of ‘electronic’, they range across a wide variety of styles, from the easily accessible commercial sounds of The Reels and Models, to quirky and experimental pieces from the likes of The Metronomes to the heavy dance beats of Primitive Calculators and Bring Philip. Influential and important innovators are also featured here, such as Whirlywirld, Voigt/465 and Scattered Order.

For me, the chance to get a hold of a copy of the original recording of The Machinations’ classic 1981 debut single Average Inadequacy pretty much makes the album worth getting for that reason alone. Whilst the band later produced some commercially successful pieces, Average Inadequacy was the tune that made a big mark on the growing independent music scene around the country at that time. It could be the archetype for this whole collection and should remind you, like much of the music here, that we had some awfully strong talent hidden in the closed circuits of the past.

- Andrew Bartlett.