PPOdd

Another band from the East Village of NYC, 3 Teens Kill 4 was a musicians-and-artists collective that made minimal-angst no-wave synth with samples and other sound surprises.

A.E. Bizottsag was a collective of visual artists and musicians that produced a mixture of post-punk and art performance in Hungary’s 80s underground. They had a big impact in the country but are largely unknown outside.

A short-lived project by some of Belgium’s finest avant-gardists, Des Airs only released a mini-LP, but their music showcases an excellent mix of DIY post-punk (anti-)aesthetics.

Very obscure band whose album Red Therapy is very hard to find. All the ingredients of the perfect art-punk are here: syncopated rhythms, angular guitar sounds, strange noises, a sense of dislocation.

An accurate example of the prog/jazzy-meets-DIY-ethics that characterised the amazing label Crammed Discs, this project was formed by the label’s founder Marc Hollander. Multi-genred, adventurous music.

A rarity from the NDW days, Ami Marie composed Kraftwerk-esque blippy minimalism, but with an obscure edge.

The strangely-named Amoebas in Chaos only released one album, but it is of high nerd-wave / spoken-post-punk quality. With similarly-odd-named tracks like “Nuclear Tofu” and a mixture of percussive noises and nonsense lyrics, their one LP is definitely worth tracking down for the lovers of all things left of early Talking Heads madness.

A great minimal-synth/NDW rarity that is a mixture of quirky Belgian Telex-style vocoders and German surreal/dada-NDW words. If you ever come across it, grab it, it is one of the most expensive records of the era!

One of the post-punk period’s most inventive bands, the Native Hipsters made incredibly bizarre records sampling a variety of things and creating noises, mixed with voices telling strange stories. A John Peel favourite that nevertheless remains largely unknown. Time to discover them.

Andy Giorbino is probably the most bizarre electronic artist of the early 80s coming from the legendary Zick Zack label. Although he was relatively prolific, his work is largely unknown.

The amazing Anemic Boyfriends released one of the most hilarious meta-reggae anti-male post-punk critiques that has to be listened to be believed. Their mutant showtune reggae with lyrics as “guys are such creeps, they’ll even do it with sheep” is simply insane.

A one-off 7” collaboration by short lived Australian post-punk project Essendon Airport and vocalist Anne Cessna.

They have only released one song and it is impossible to find info about them, yet we wanted to include this silly tune, as it is such a wonderful celebration/self-reference of a scene.

When two Italians: supermodel Ann Steel and cosmic composer Roberto Cacciapaglia came together, they recorded one of the weirdest electro-pop albums ever. It sounds like normal songs, whose backgrounds have gone all wrong.

Bizarre minimal-synth all-girl project, that is extremely difficult to find information on. Beautiful early 80s DIY messthetics, free-form synths, spokey off-vox and the rest.

A super-band of the underground consisting of Fred Frith, Chris Cutler and Dagmar Krause, Art Bears produced three LP gems of post-punk-free-jazz-cabaret hysteria that still sound fresh. A must.

A very short-lived electro-minimal-pop project from Australia, releasing only one 7”: ‘Love by Numbers’, which is however one of the most interesting pop-non-pop songs of the early 80s.

Not exactly a band, rather an art project by Australian artist Philip Brothy, Asphixiation created an avant-disco mix, which was accompanied by a series of artworks and titled “What is This Thing Called Disco”.

The Astronauts crafted bizarre/theatrical but also beautiful post-punk gems and they were probably that extra bit too melodic and folk-inspired for the punk scene to notice as much as it should have.

A strange example of a band that managed to touch the mainstream despite they were fairly strange – well, the French early 80s mainstream, that is. A Trois Dans Les WC sound like proto-Ladytron mixed with surreal shouty vox on top.