The best compilation titles are as evocative as they are explanatory: Valium Orgasms, Someone Got Their Head Kicked In!, The Philosophy of Sound and Machine. When Spaniards Ani Zinc and Javier G. Marin released two compilations entitled Terra Incognita (“unknown territories”) on their Auxilio de Cientos label in 1985 and 1986, the name was both succinct and suggestive. Few eras of music remain as muddy and confounding as the early-to-mid ’80s, when the lines between post-punk, industrial, no wave, new wave, fourth world, and other styles became nearly impossible to parse.
While recent comps may have explored this period in greater detail (some of the better ones include The Minimal Wave Tapes and Oz Waves), Terra Incognita I and II are two of the earliest. They have languished out of print for over three decades, with both volumes trading online for ludicrous amounts. On this affordable, single-volume edition, the British reissue label Emotional Rescue cherry-picks tracks that have eluded compilers over the years. Today, Terra Incognita remains wondrously arcane, with thrilling new sounds from around the globe—France, Belgium, Spain, America, Africa—lurking around every corner.
No matter the year or the context, “Criola,” the collaboration between the Congolese/Belgian duo of Denis Mpunga and Paul K, would be a standout: It is a startling mash-up of Mpunga’s heavenly warble and a rockslide of drum machines, explosive hand percussion, and effervescent marimba lines. The heady mixture was basically a one-off (though the Music From Memory label recently unearthed extra tracks from this session). Its only real antecedent from that decade came from French composer Hector Zazou and his Congolese collaborator Bony Bikaye, who in 1983 teamed with French electronic duo Cy 1 to make an audacious amalgam of African rhythms, drum machine, and experimental electronics on Noir Et Blanc. Zazou and Bikaye contribute “Komba” to this set, and the duo again sounds like little else from that era: Melding Bikaye’s earthy vocals to a weightless synth backdrop, they create a woozy sort of lullaby. Zazou also appears in another enchanting collaboration on “Stranger in the New Light,” which finds him working with the Congolese singer Ray Lema and a mysterious figure named Nodland, their ethereal voices casting spells over dribbling hand drum and crepuscular keys.
Other acts featured on the comp are even more obscure, but while these artists may not have wielded much influence at the time, these mutant noises feel particularly resonant today. Right now, somewhere in Bushwick, some band is probably seeking to emulate Mal’s whiplash synth-punk or the Belgian husband-wife duo Bene Gesserit’s drunken machine din and howling, whispering gibberish. While they might have only made one cassette in 1984, the Poe-referencing entity called La Caida de la Casa Usher suggests what Arca might sound like if he had come up as an early-’80s punk, with Spanish-language vocals snarling over drum machines that flay like a whip.
It doesn’t all anticipate the future, or even hold up very well. The flanged, lo-fi guitars of Image Pour Image and the muffled funk-punk weirdness of Instead Of sound pretty much like any other stumbling rock-not-rock act, no matter what peculiar production choices they made. But nothing here is as strange as American outsider Danny Alias and his answer record to Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman.” Alias’ first single, “Civil Defense,” caught the ear of no less than Chicago house legend Ron Hardy, who created an edit of the tune. Here, “Big Brother - The Answer” mimic’s Anderson’s vocodered delivery, intoning cryptic phrases (“Hello, this is the clinic/Are you queer?”; “Big Brother said/You’re not the first/But you’re not the last”) as synths and woodwind lurch in the background. By turns paranoid, vicious, gorgeous, perverse, and silly, it hints at even stranger musical terrain that still remains unexplored.
