Before the Name
The sound existed before anyone called it electroclash. In 1997, Ferenc van der Sluijs, a Dutch producer working as I-F out of The Hague, released Space Invaders Are Smoking Grass on the Viewlexx label. It grafted verse-chorus pop dynamics onto burbling electro and ran everything through a vocoder. The following year in Grenoble, France, Michel Amato (The Hacker) and Caroline Hervé (Miss Kittin) recorded the EP Champagne for DJ Hell’s International DeeJay Gigolo Records in Munich. Two tracks, 1982 and Frank Sinatra, became underground anthems: Miss Kittin’s flat, disaffected vocal delivery over The Hacker’s deliberately cheap synth lines set a template that dozens of acts would follow. DJ Hell (Helmut Geier) had founded Gigolo in 1996 as an offshoot of Munich’s Disko B label. By signing Miss Kittin and The Hacker, he turned it into the genre’s first gathering point. Since many of electroclash’s earliest artists debuted in Munich’s nightclubs, the city has a credible claim as the place where the genre was co-invented.
The Festival and the Word
The term itself belongs to Larry Tee. Born Lawrence Thom in 1959, Tee had spent the 1980s in Atlanta alongside RuPaul and Lady Bunny before moving to New York in 1986. He co-wrote RuPaul’s 1992 hit Supermodel (You Better Work), ran parties during the Club Kids era, and by the late 1990s was DJing a weekly night called Berliniamsburg at Luxx, a small dancehall at 256 Grand Street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Tee trademarked the word “electroclash” and, from October 10 to 14, 2001, staged the first Electroclash Festival at Luxx. The lineup included Peaches, Fischerspooner, Scissor Sisters, and A.R.E. Weapons. A second festival followed in 2002, then U.S. and European tours in 2003 and 2004.
The Roland MC-505 and Other Cheap Machines
Electroclash’s sonic palette was defined by the instruments its artists could afford, which were the same instruments nobody else wanted in the late 1990s. Roland’s SH-101 monophonic synthesizer, released in 1983 and available for under $200, provided buzzy bass and lead lines. The MC-202, essentially an SH-101 crammed into a smaller enclosure with rubber buttons instead of keys, offered the same filter at an even lower price. The TR-606, a small analog drum machine designed as a companion to the TB-303, supplied tinny kicks and snares that producers left deliberately unpolished. Peaches (Merrill Nisker) built the entirety of The Teaches of Peaches on a single Roland MC-505 Groovebox in her Toronto bedroom. Her roommate, Leslie Feist, sang backing vocals. The lo-fi constraints were the point: if synth-pop in 1983 had tried to sound futuristic, electroclash in 2001 wanted to sound like 1983 trying to sound futuristic, with all the cheap plastic and tape hiss left in.
The Acts
Peaches recorded The Teaches of Peaches in 2000 for the Berlin label Kitty-Yo. The track Fuck the Pain Away, which became her signature, was captured live during its first-ever performance at The Rivoli in Toronto, where she was opening for a friend named Howie Beck. The master came from a cassette recording of the board mix, handed to her by the sound engineer in exchange for five dollars. She never re-recorded it.
In New York, Warren Fischer and Casey Spooner had formed Fischerspooner in 1998. Their live shows were Warhol-scale productions: synchronized dancers, flamboyant costumes, multimedia projections, and a deliberate blurring of performance art and pop concert. Their single Emerge (2001), released on Gigolo, attracted a bidding war. Ministry of Sound, a UK label looking to expand into artist albums, signed them for a reported one to two million pounds. Their debut #1 came out in 2002. American critics were hostile.
In Detroit, married couple Nicola Kuperus and Adam Lee Miller had been making anxious, stripped-down electro-punk as Adult. since 1998 on their own Ersatz Audio label. Their sound predated the electroclash label, and they resisted it, but the press lumped them in regardless.
Felix da Housecat, a Chicago producer with deep roots in house music, collaborated with Miss Kittin on Kittenz and Thee Glitz (2001). Its single Silver Screen Shower Scene, built on a melody sampled from The Flirts’ Passion, became inescapable in Ibiza and across UK compilations, the first electroclash track many listeners heard without knowing what to call it.
The Berlin Axis
Berlin absorbed electroclash faster than any other city. Ellen Allien, who had founded BPitch Control in 1999, released Stadtkind in 2001 and Berlinette in 2003. She insisted she made indie electro, not electroclash, but the distinction mattered less than the geography: BPitch Control shared clubs and audiences with Gigolo acts. DJ Hell relocated Gigolo from Munich to Berlin in 2001. Chicks on Speed, the art-school duo of Melissa Logan and Alex Murray-Leslie, had met at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich in 1997 and ran Chicks on Speed Records, releasing music by Le Tigre and Planningtorock. Their punk-collage aesthetic fit the scene’s preference for provocation over polish.
Ladytron, formed in Liverpool in 1999 by Helen Marnie, Mira Aroyo, Daniel Hunt, and Reuben Wu, released 604 in 2001 using instruments so cheap at the time that the same models now sell for tens of thousands of dollars. They rejected the electroclash tag, but their cold synth-pop owed the same debts to the same 1980s sources.
The Collapse
Electroclash’s lifespan was short even by micro-genre standards. By 2003, the backlash had arrived. Entertainment Weekly dismissed The Electroclash Mix compilation as “shallow and redundant.” The Dutch producer I-F signed an “Anti-Electroclash Manifest” protesting the commercialization of a sound he had helped originate. In July 2003, The Village Voice reported that Luxx would hold its last Berliniamsburg night on July 19. The scene’s Berlin wing had already declared the hype over.
The problem was structural. A genre built on being seen in the right room, wearing the right outfit, delivering the right smirk has a limited shelf life. Once the major labels arrived (Fischerspooner’s deal being the obvious example), underground credibility evaporated. Acts either evolved past the label, as Ladytron did, or faded from view. Tiga, the Montreal DJ whose 2001 cover of Corey Hart’s Sunglasses at Night on Gigolo had been a scene staple, moved into deeper techno. Miss Kittin built a career as a solo DJ that outlasted the genre by decades.
What electroclash left behind was a permission structure: the idea that electronic dance music could be funny, confrontational, sexually explicit, deliberately lo-fi, and sung by someone who refused to pretend they could sing. That sensibility fed directly into the blog-house and electro-house movements of 2005 to 2008, and it resurfaces whenever a producer plugs in a cheap monosynth and decides that sincerity is overrated.
Essential Listening
- Miss Kittin & The Hacker – First Album (2001)
- Peaches – The Teaches of Peaches (2000)
- Fischerspooner – #1 (2001)
- Felix da Housecat – Kittenz and Thee Glitz (2001)
- Adult. – Resuscitation (2001)
- Ladytron – 604 (2001)
- Chicks on Speed – Chicks on Speed Will Save Us All! (2000)
- Tiga – Sexor (2006)
- The Hacker – Mélodies En Sous-Sol (2000)
- Ellen Allien – Berlinette (2003)
- I-F – Mixed Up in the Hague Vol. 1 (2000)
- Avenue D – Avenue D (2003)