Monday 21 April 2014

Unit Eight - Glass Head -1981- (LP, Rouge, RMS/LP 130), UK


So I'm a huge fan of library records, specially if it involves electronic music. My main problem is that I always have trouble knowing which ones are the pearls (any suggestions are welcome!). Usually I go for the ones that do not contain eighty songs of twenty seconds, but have got proper songs on there. Still, a lot of library records can be quite cheesy. But not this one!

Unit Eight consisted of two people: F. McDonald and C. Rae. They had at least four releases on Rouge and this one comes from 1981. Rouge was a sub-label of the legendary British library records distribution label De Wolfe. The music on this record is described as Modern group sounds featuring electronic keyboards played by Unit Eight. You can find many library records over at this excellent blog.

This is an absolute cosmic disco, minimal synth classic. It has some cheesy library music touches to it, but nevertheless it's a record with almost only A-sides. Every melody seems like it has always existed and all the songs get stuck in the head. It's the missing link between stuff like Gary Numan/Tubeway Army, Yellow Magic Orchestra, Space (magic fly) and library minimal synth. It also reminds me of Latvian electronic space disco group Zodiac and the Philippe Laboudigue songs on this record. So it has a lot of dancefloor value because of the great combination of electronics with some more commercial melodies.

Our new favourite minimal synth record?

Get it HERE

9 comments:

  1. i simply love the concept, each invention has its own advantages and disadvantages that makes it better. But beside this every new idea should be acceptable like yours.
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  2. Thank you Bence. Very nice share. And wonderful blog too.
    Hope you don't mind if I shared your post at Librarymusicthemes blog.
    http://librarymusicthemes.boardhost.com/viewtopic.php?pid=15751#p15751

    Thanks again.

    G.

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    Replies
    1. Hi Greta,

      Thank you for the kind words! Cheers!

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  3. Many thanks for sharing, I found the link over at the Librarymusicthemes forum which Great kindly posted a link for.

    F. McDonald and C. Rae are names I am pretty familiar with from their contributions to the UK Astral Sounds library series which were released on four different library labels and amount to about 16 or 17 releases (all of them can be found on the net with a little digging, I know dancefromspace.blogspot.co.uk has most of them posted.

    If you are looking for cool electronic cosmic disco library music, you can't do better than check all of them out, I think the earliest was released around 77/78 and the latest 1985/86 - Not all of them are great but nearly all of them have at least one killer track.

    Hope that helps.

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    Replies
    1. Hello,

      Wow, thank you so much for the information. Will definitely check those out.

      Cheers!

      Delete
  4. Along this theme Andy Clarke is hard to beat, his albums 'Futures' and 'The Next One' are excellent.

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  5. Thank you, this is quite the gift!

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  6. thanks for the upload...could you post it in lossless? helps to offset the voynil sound:)

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  7. I would be very grateful if you could provide an updated link for this one!

    ReplyDelete