Pierre Henry, White Noise, and Bruce Haack were all touchstones cited by Animal Collective frontman Avey Tare when he discussed Roberto Cacciapaglia's The Ann Steel Album on Altered Zones in 2010. What binds the work of those artists with Cacciapaglia's intent for this album is a desire to funnel avant-garde influences into a robust future-pop sound. This record originally came out in 1979, just a few years after Giorgio Moroder was in his pomp with "I Feel Love", and during a time when the "disco sucks" campaign was gathering momentum. This isn't a disco record, but it leans hard on the kind of arpeggiated synths Moroder often favored, and occasionally acts as a precursor to the kind of spacey club jams Arthur Russell dabbled in around this time. It was certainly made during a period when dark clouds loomed over anything bridging the unholy triumvirate of dance, pop, and electronic music. Imagine Ann Magnuson of Bongwater teaming up with Russell in a dingy studio in Reagan-era New York City and you're close to grasping how The Ann Steel Album sounds.
So who are Roberto Cacciapaglia and Ann Steel? The former is an Italian musician who specialized in electronic composition after starting his career in the early 1970s on the edges of the krautrock scene. The latter is a Michigan-bred singer who spun into Cacciapaglia's orbit during a trip to Italy in the 1970s to do some modeling. The Ann Steel Album is the one-off result of that happy accident, a record so full of joy that it's a surprise they weren't tempted to go back for another bite once it was in the can. But it's a credit to both of them that they knew when to stop, perhaps feeling that the sugary pop perfection of these recordings could never be replicated. There's a clunky charm to many of the synth sounds, most of which influenced bands like Stereolab and the perennially underrated Pram in future years; Steel even has a strain to her voice that's reminiscent of Pram singer Rosie Cuckston.
There are two modes that Cacciapaglia and Steel flit between on this album. Mostly it's a precise brand of fizzy avant-electronica with a utopian edge to it ("My Time", "Media"), set to lyrics about metaphysics, Freud, Warhol, the media, candy bars, and a huge range of pop culture marginalia. Albert Einstein gets a mention in both of the first two tracks, preceding a brief trend for writing songs about him (Landscape, Big Audio Dynamite) in the 80s. The second type of song on The Ann Steel Album echoes the kind of ruminative electronic work Broadcast would pick up on in future years, with tracks like "Quite Still" and "Sparkling World" set around half-paced beats and blotchy keyboard noise. But it's in the upbeat work that the pair really excels, and the basic formula is often retooled to work in other elements such as the funk undertow of "Portrait" and the unabashed ABBA tributary of "Media", which give the album a broad range of colors that help overcome Steel's limited (and endearingly squeaky) voice.
One of the strongest and most interesting songs comes at the center of the record in the shape of "Measurable Joys", which works as Cacciapaglia and Steel's paean to the completely synthetic world they long to inhabit. The lyrics condemn nature, punk, poetry, and even stained-glass windows, while praise is heaped on artifice, precision, technology, and TV. It's a song that works in two ways, both as a critique of the traditionalists crushing hard on the heels of musicians working in a certain strain of electronic music at the time, and as a harbinger of what was to come. After all, in a few years following The Ann Steel Album the pair almost got their wish, with the European charts awash with bands like Depeche Mode, Soft Cell, the Human League, and other starry-eyed forward thinkers. But this record works somewhere on the fringes of pop, as a distant cousin to commercially successful songs with an off-kilter hue like the Rah Band's "Clouds Across the Moon" or Dollar's "Hand Held in Black and White", where its reputation has deservedly grown to something approximating cult-classic status.
