Photo: Georg Gatsas

By Pieter Schoolwerth

The Wierd Party at Home Sweet Home every Wednesday has been frozen hot and rockin’ the past year, so let me start by saying thank you to everyone who’s kept our fragile ship afloat!

Over the past few months, I’ve found the deliriously-exhausting demands of the four-on-the-packed-dance floor beat week after week leading me back to the flip side of the Cold Waves and Minimal Electronics compilation I recently organized with Joe Daniels of Angular Recording Co. in London. And that is the rich history of down and mid-tempo melancholic minimal synth songs; call it “Warm Waves and Maximal Electronics,” if you will. This mix was very much the sound of the Wierd Party in its earliest days, when it was just a handful of close friends sitting around the Southside Lounge in Brooklyn, playing our favorite long-forgotten records late into the night. Unlike the frenzied electro-punk spirit in Europe’s great minimal electronic groups, a profoundly visual, dramatic and radically psychedelic world opens up when the BPMs slow down. I have always thought it to be a long-overlooked missing piece in the historical puzzle connecting German electronic music from the ’60s and ’70s to trance, acid techno, trip hop and many of the moody electronic textures that arose in the UK and New York later in the ’90s.

Anyway, without VRurther adieu…whip yourself up an eminently stiff cocktail, and enjoy the evening air and the cold sounds of the Wierd world!