Released in 1981, the SDS-V was an electronic drum kit produced by British company Simmons, which was founded in 1978 by Dave Simmons and remained active until 1999. Though retaining a classic layout, the SDS-V’s glossy, hexagonal drums invoked a futuristic, scientific aesthetic that implied a rejection of the sweaty toil previously involved in percussion…

Perhaps someone can tell me what the fuck is going on here?

Rockwell, born Kennedy William Gordy, is the son of Motown founder Berry Gordy. Despite his father’s discouraging comments regarding his early songs, Kennedy wrote “Somebody’s Watching Me” in 1983 and submitted a demo to Motown under the name Rockwell because, as he claimed later, he didn’t want his father’s legacy to influence his success…

Thomas Dolby (born Thomas Morgan Robertson, he took the stage name Dolby from a nickname he received as a studio recording obsessive) burst onto the music scene in 1981 at the forefront of the new wave of post-punk bands using electronic instrumentation in the UK…

Released in April 1980, the same month that friction between police and local black communities resulted in the St Pauls riot in Bristol, The Beat’s “Mirror in the Bathroom” captured perfectly the tense paranoia, as well as the personal and national disaffection of the day…

As the 1970s drew to a close, the appetite for science fiction-related material of any type and in any form (though preferably of low price) was such that its effects were visible in every field: the post-Star Wars windfall admitted all comers…

“Solo Me Muevo Por Dinero” is the work of Spanish brothers Xeno and Tucho Baladon, known collectively as Xalan. The Euro disco duo released only two 12” singles, this and 1987’s Revolution Without Solution. The acquisitive, upwardly-mobile young urban professionals who became known as Yuppies in the early 1980s made their appearance in Spain at the tail end of an explosion of popular creativity…

Electronic music pioneer Suzanne Ciani got her start in the staid musical conservatories of Wellesley College, but left for the West Coast in the late ’60s to get a Master’s at Berkeley, where she met synthesizer designer Don Buchla and began experimenting with electronic instrumentation…

As worries about the possibility of nuclear war spiked in the early 1980s, anxiety and anger began to surface in many of the arts, including British punk music. Punk had been politicized since the movement’s inception and many of those involved were, initially at least, informed by the experience of the British art schools…