In a galaxy all too near, amid tattered old copies of Future Music magazine, tangles of cables and a couple of broken sequencers, a trio of electronica nerds huddle around a glowing console plotting a recipe for the perfect album. “It should,” says one, “have all the bleak urban dystopianism of Detroit techno at its most sci-fi, a sense of glacial blank robot cool, but with a dirty analogue edge, like Drexciya having it off with Cabaret Voltaire.”
“But also let it be pastoral,” adds another, contrarily, “let it have mesmerising, somniferous, trance-inducing qualities, a groove and a sense of the organic, of humanity, of pop, rock and indie.”
The third, the nerdiest of all, to whom ideas about art remain alien, is concerned only with the technology. “And let it be created,” he says, “in a studio where every kind of synthesizer is available, ranks of them from every era, all controlled by the most modern software.”
Their spell is cast and, hey presto, Wrangler are born. What more could our threesome hope for than a member of Cabaret Voltaire, Sheffield’s original industrial-electronic voice in the wilderness, a member of Tunng, the band who have come to define the much abused and horrid - although apt - term “folk-tronic”, and the emperor of synthesizer geeks, with his gigantic collection of kit from the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties?
Wrangler are, then, respectively, Stephen Mallinder, Phil Winter and Benge, and their debut album is a creature that is by turns sinister, icily lovely, hypnotic, gritty and spectral. It is all that our trio of electronic nerds could have asked for, from the Kraftwerk-go-bleep space android proto-house groove of “Music IIC” to incidental music for a particularly moody scene in a posited sequel to Bladerunner ("Peace & Love") to the buzzing “Fade to Grey”-flavoured whispery electro-pop of “Theme From Wrangler”.
LA Spark is an album that underground electronic aficionados will treasure while the rest of the world will look on, as it always has, and say, “But that’s not real music.” It was always thus and, in their lair, our nerd trio plug in their sensory deprivation units and do not care.
Overleaf: listen to Wrangler in session and in conversation with Marc Riley on BBC Radio 6
