Review Rock music

Electric Party

Play

Knekelhuis • 2021

Whoever releases reissues nowadays usually doesn’t just make lost material accessible again, but often tells a whole story along the way with such an archaeological activity in the history of sound media. In the case of the compilation »Play« by the Dutch band Electric Party, this includes their only album »Work« from 1982, released on an Amsterdam cassette label called Fetisj as the fifth and at the same time last title of the company. From the tape, which was recorded at the time in the Fetisj Sound Studios belonging to the label, three numbers can now be heard again on »Play« together with previously unreleased material from other cassettes. You can get to know a project that connected things that were in the air at the time and were also thought together by others. New Wave, Post-Punk, Funk and Synthiepop mix in it, boorish vocals, an unpolished production that makes you think of what today would be called Minimal Electro. Quite in the good sense. And in »Caribe«, written in 1987 for the opening of a Spanish discotheque, a reggae bass comes into play. René van Rijn is considered the »head« of [Electric Party](https://www.hhv-mag.com/de/glossareintrag/6664,) responsible for »Zang« and synthesizer on the cover of »Work« under the pseudonym DJ Solo. At the beginning of the nineties he made trance as Clark Nova for a short time. But that’s another story.