Album Review: Rodion G.A. - The Lost Tapes

If you didn't know the back-story, the genre, the label or any other contextual information and just put Rodion G.A. on then it's possible that your head might very well explode. The music of Romanian producer Rodion Rosca is both good and confounding, drawing influence from everything from prog to komische to no wave music, more than likely without having heard any of the above. His sounds don't so much redefine music, as consume and bastardise it into his own unique style.

In a retro futurist twist, Rodion was making these sounds from behind the iron curtain between 1978 and 1983. While he used early synths, electric guitar, a bunch of self-made pedals and primitive drum machines, his main compositional tools were reel-to-reel tape machines. There's a real shrillness to some of the synth work here, and the percussion is stark and metronomic. Yet there's also something that's much more than the sum of its parts, a certain experimental inquisitiveness where you get the sense that Rodion and his band are making it up as they go along – and loving it.

Not just raw, the music is dark and the electronics are noisy, strange and psychedelic, at times feeling barely in control. This may be the reason that Rodion G.A. only ever had two of their more rock-orientated singles released, despite receiving radioplay and touring relentlessly. This is the band's lost material and it could've easily been made yesterday. It's quite diverse, with everything from vocals to piano appearing between the flanged-out electrics. It maintains a kind of militant minimalness, yet this primitive, noisy electro-pop music is endlessly engaging, demonstrating that just because the path wasn't travelled, it doesn't mean we shouldn't be on it.