Joy Electric

Item: We Are The Music Makers
Author: Todd Brown

We Are The Music Makers

(1996)

Reviewed by Todd Brown

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Label Tooth & Nail RecordsThe LighthouseDecember 1996

electronic electronica indie pop synth pop

Those who lament the passing of eighties synth pop, rejoice. Those who think wistfully of the days when New Order reigned supreme, you have a new favoured child. Ronnie Martin makes brilliant music. He always has, whether as a part of the Dance House Children or on his own as Joy Electric. There, my biases are in the open.

Martin's music has always shown a certain fondness for the British synthetic music of the mid-eighties and this effort is no exception. Like the great bands of that time, Martin writes songs which run along the balance of being up-tempo dance tracks and carrying with them strong lyrical content and an almost eerie, gothic quality. New Order is the most obvious example of this type of music, and while comparisons can be made between the two, Martin's music is distinctly his own.

A purist in the purest sense of the world, Martin has long been working towards the day when he would have the means to make music from scratch, with no limitations placed on him by his instruments. He's been close before, but this project is the first realisation of that dream. There are no natural instruments whatsoever on this disc. No guitars, no bass, no drums, nothing but synthetics. But it goes beyond that. There are also no pre-programmed synthesisers, no drum machines, no samplers. All the sounds on the record were made from scratch, in some instances with keyboards being custom built to generate the sounds desired. This has two effects.

First, the music sounds better than it ever has. The tinny, Nintendo-like quality of Melody is entirely gone. While Martin still uses plenty of his trademark bleeps and bloops, the sounds are thicker and richer than they ever have been.

The down side to this musical purity comes in the drum tracks. Rather than freeing himself to create new and more innovative percussion sounds, it seems as if Martin has limited his range of options to only one or two thudding pulses. The result? The drum loops on his work used to be some of the highlights (check the Joy Electric track on Art Core Volume 2, or any of the tracks on Five Stars For Failure to see what I mean), but they're now the major weakness.

Lyrically, this is as positive as Martin's ever been, with the majority of the songs being virtually praise songs. The chorus of "Pilgrimage" is simply, "Lo, I am with you always," while "Christendom on White Horses" declares:

On white horses Children of the first throne On white horses Our King lives forevermore.

We Are The Music Makers is not a perfect record-I personally think Five Stars For Failure is Martin's strongest to date-but it is very good, nonetheless.