The short version
- In 1983 the Yamaha DX7 arrived at $1,995 and this music stopped being a rich man's hobby.
- MIDI arrived the same year, and machines from rival companies finally spoke over one cable.
- Twenty-minute pieces turned into three-minute ones. Films, stadiums and living rooms took the space.
- Three records at the end of this piece let you hear the decade for yourself.
In January 1983, on a trade show floor in Anaheim, somebody ran a single cable between two synthesizers built by companies that had no reason to cooperate. One was American, a Prophet 600. The other was Japanese, a Jupiter 6. A key went down on one and the other one sounded. To anyone walking past it was a parlour trick. The trick was called MIDI, and the music that had grown in West Berlin back rooms through the previous decade would not survive it unchanged.
The floor fell out of the price
In the 1970s this sound came with debt attached. A Moog modular was something a band bought on credit. The Fairlight CMI, built in Australia and sold from 1979, cost £15,000, and the second series three years later cost £30,000. A machine that recorded a sound and gave it back to you on a keyboard belonged to people who already owned studios.
Yamaha ended that in 1983 with the DX7 at $1,995. It ran on the FM synthesis worked out at Stanford, it was the first digital synthesizer most musicians could actually buy, and it sold more than 200,000 units. Drums went the same way. The Roland TR-808 landed in 1980 at $1,195, the LinnDrum brought real drum samples in 1982, and the TR-909 of 1983 was the first Roland drum machine with MIDI on the back.
Cheap instruments mean different people. By the middle of the decade you could make this music out of one room and one salary.
The machines started talking
The MIDI specification went out in August 1983. Before it, every manufacturer wired things its own way, and playing two synthesizers at once meant using two hands. Now one keyboard drove a stack of them, and a sequencer could do the driving while the player went to make coffee.
That changed the shape of the music itself. A long 1970s piece was one performance, kept whole. When the machines drifted, the drift stayed on the record, which is how the famous slide in Phaedra survives. After MIDI, a piece was built from short parts, stacked and corrected. What used to be one event across twenty minutes now had to be eight events inside three.
Pieces got shorter and went to the pictures
Tangerine Dream got there first. Michael Mann's Thief opened in the United States in March 1981 with their score under it. Risky Business followed in 1983. Ridley Scott's Legend went out in Europe with music by Jerry Goldsmith and reached American cinemas in 1986 with music by Tangerine Dream, so the same film sounded different depending on which continent you watched it on.
Film work hands you a stopwatch. If the scene is ninety seconds, the cue is ninety seconds. Johannes Schmoelling joined in 1979 and left in October 1985, and the records from those years are tight and bright in a way the band had never been. Fans still argue about them. The argument is the clearest evidence that something had turned.
Vangelis took the whole cinema. On 29 March 1982 the score for Chariots of Fire won the Academy Award. That summer Blade Runner set the sound every film about the future would borrow from for the next forty years. Anyone who wanted to own it had to wait, though. The album did not appear until June 1994.
The stage got bigger
Jean-Michel Jarre went the other way, outward. In the autumn of 1981 he played twice in Beijing and three times in Shanghai. His official biography calls him the first Western pop musician to play China after the Cultural Revolution. On 5 April 1986 he used downtown Houston as a stage, for the city's 150th anniversary and NASA's 25th. Accounts of the crowd run between 1.3 and 1.5 million, which is another way of saying nobody could count it.
Fifteen years after the back room, the audience was a city.
The sound moved into the living room
In America it got a new name. Kitaro signed a worldwide distribution deal with Geffen in the middle of the decade and released Toward the West in 1986, with his first American tour following in the autumn of 1987. That February the Grammys had added a new age category for the first time.
A name creates a shelf, and a shelf sells records. It also costs something. Music made in a room in West Berlin ended up filed beside music written for massage rooms, and anyone who plays this stuff for a friend today still has to get past the word "background" first. That misunderstanding starts here.
The sound moved onto the dance floor
At the other end of the same decade it went to the clubs. On 12 December 1981 Manuel Göttsching played for fifty-eight minutes without stopping and kept the tape. Three years later it came out on Klaus Schulze's label as E2-E4. In 1989 the Italian record Sueño Latino lifted it wholesale, and dance music has claimed the piece as an ancestor ever since.
Detroit had the same story. Juan Atkins has said that around 1980 he drove around with a tape of nothing but Kraftwerk, Telex, Devo, Giorgio Moroder and Gary Numan. Derrick May explained the appeal in plainer terms: the European records were clean and classy, and to them they sounded like outer space, while everything in Detroit was an ugly mess.
In Britain the same influence came back as radio hits. Andy McCluskey of OMD can still give you the date and the seat number: 11 September 1975, Liverpool Empire, Q36, watching Kraftwerk.
How to listen: three records that hold the decade
- Zoolook (Jean-Michel Jarre, 1984). Play the title track. Speech and singing in twenty-five languages went into a Fairlight and came back out as an instrument. The first minute tells you what happens when a voice becomes a keyboard.
- Blade Runner (Vangelis). Play "Main Titles". Two minutes that every film about the future has been borrowing from ever since.
- E2-E4 (Manuel Göttsching, 1984). Fifty-eight minutes played once, straight through. Ten minutes in you understand why dance music keeps coming back to it. For where Göttsching sits on the Berlin map, start with the Tangerine Dream guide.
If you send one track to a friend, send the title track from Zoolook. Send this with it: the MIDI standard those two synthesizers used on that trade show floor in 1983 is still the one your gear uses now. Forty years, one promise nobody has broken.
By the end of the decade the seed described in the soil of the seventies had come up as a whole wood. One tree in a cinema, one in a stadium, one in a living room, one in a club.