Stretching from an era when electronic instruments still had an air of novelty until they had become the default mode of musical production, the tracks on this double album tell a different story than mainstream documentaries.
While the songs are more out-there than the hits featured on nostalgia playlists, Periphery + Progress doesn’t aspire to provide a counter-history. Instead, the compilation’s purpose is to restore depth and breadth to a period too often reduced to caricatures and clichés.
This isn’t Stranger Things, in other words.
Peripheral Minimal Records released the first volume in 2018, in the wake of the Netflix series’ global success, when early-1980s culture was the hottest thing going. Young people from Gen Z were excitedly discovering the music their parents had listened to in their teens.
That’s when classic post-punk bands like New Order, The Cure, and Sisters of Mercy were attracting tons of new fans. While most of those artists still used traditional musical instruments, their openness to new technology paved the way for strictly electronic artists who were resistant to the major keys and maudlin sentiments of mainstream pop.
Now labelled “Dark Wave”—a retroactively applied category like Film Noir—this music captured the sense of bitter resignation spreading around the world in the late 2010s, when resurgent authoritarianism and declining affordability had people worrying that the future would be worse than the past. New artists set out to make music that would fit this subgenre, finding different ways to reproduce the desaturated melancholy of their Cold War forebears, who had made their mark when the last embers of the counterculture had been extinguished by policies promoting economic austerity and social retrenchment.
Peripheral Minimal Records’ decision to issue an expanded edition of Periphery + Progress, doubling the original thirteen tracks, made perfect sense in light of this historical link, which inspired music lovers to flesh out their back catalogue. And the compilation is destined to remain timely, given current trends in both culture and politics.
Although the album includes tracks from later in the 1980s, most date from the first half of the decade, with ten coming from 1981 alone. Back then, constructing songs around pure synth tones and tinny digital beats was still a novelty in the mainstream. The new approach thrilled music lovers eager to break free from the domination of classic rock aesthetics, but also triggered a backlash.
At the time, I was living in a rural Southern Maryland suburb where electronic music was regarded as inauthentic because many artists were unable to play their songs without extensive technological assistance. It was also dismissed for its association with transgressive sexuality, a stigma that rapidly intensified after the AIDS crisis became front-page news.
These days, it’s hard to remember how sharp the divide was between “rock” and “pop” in the early 1980s. By the end of the millennium, electronic dance music and hip-hop were commercially dominant and have continued pushing traditional rock-and-roll into the margins, to the point where music made with only guitars, bass, and drums feels as niche as a bebop quartet.
I love how Periphery + Progress transports me back to my early teens, when choosing to listen to electronic music felt like an irreversible life choice, not by making tendentious claims, but simply by compiling songs which, because I had not heard them before, retain the aura of danger that the music of more successful artists like Depeche Mode, OMD, Yazoo, and The Human League has lost over decades of nostalgia-driven listening.
Surprisingly, I felt this way most intensely when listening to tracks on the more accessible end of the spectrum, such as Naked Lunch’s “Rabies”, V-Sor, X’s “Conversation With”, and Illustration’s “Dimensions of Design.” These are the kind of songs that, with the right promotional legwork and a bit of luck, could have been minor hits. The fact that they didn’t imbues them with a potential energy that, following Walter Benjamin, threatens to rupture the smooth continuity of linear time.
That’s what I was thinking, at any rate, as I listened to Periphery + Progress while wandering around our local Goodwill, searching for value in items people wealthier than me had decided to donate.
As the ambit of my everyday life has diminished during the past decade, I have struggled to manage feelings of cultural claustrophobia. Something inside me badly wants to travel, to see new places and meet new people. But it’s hard to find novelty when you’ve been living somewhere for over a quarter century. That’s why shopping at our nearby thrift stores has been vitally important for sustaining my fragile spirits.
Back when I was a university student in the San Francisco Bay Area, when the vast majority of my funds were reserved for food and rent, I had learned the art of thrifting. Whereas most people I knew looked for deals on clothing and household goods, however, I scoured the dusty shelves for interesting books and records.
Over time, I learned to distinguish between once-popular works that had faded from the public eye because they were not as interesting or important as they initially seemed to be and works which, though never wildly successful, had retained their value or, in some cases, increased it.
Mind you, I had a different conception of “value” than your average thrift-store habitué. I wasn’t trying to find a $5 cashmere sweater or a $10 stereo to resell and make a profit. For me, value was measured in the number of useful thoughts that a particular book or record inspired.
Finding a good novel or record album that I had never heard about not only sparked joy on its own terms—I’m thinking in particular of an LP by the Italian prog-rock band Il Sistema that I inexplicably stumbled upon in a Vallejo, California thrift store—but invited me to redraw the mental maps I use to make sense of cultural history.
While discovering a compilation like Periphery + Progress, readily available to everyone on Bandcamp, might not give me the same thrill as digging out an almost-mint-condition compilation of calliope sounds from the 1950s, the impact of listening to its contents is even more profound.
When I started writing about music, I was training to be a literary scholar. During that period, roughly three decades ago, university literature programs were still embroiled in debates, sometimes quite vicious, about the merits of revising the canon of works deemed worthy of serious study.
One thing I learned after beginning to visit thrift stores is that there would inevitably be a great deal of mediocre work by white men from decades past. It was abundantly clear to me that the impulse to make room in the canon for great books by women and people of colour went hand in hand with the realisation that, because they had faced so much resistance getting those books published in the first place, the fact that they had not been completely erased from the historical record almost guaranteed that they were worth reading.
The more time I spent in thrift stores, however, the more I learned that this wasn’t the only reason to revise the canon.
Sometimes I would come across a book that had faded from the public eye, not because it was overvalued to begin with, but because it had never been given its due. Nor was it clear to me why this book had failed to make an impression, since it seemed a lot more interesting to me than far more successful works.
Ever since then, I have gone out of my way to seek out work that has been undervalued, not for ideological reasons—other people are better equipped for that task—but because of sheer misfortune: ineffective social networks, poor publicity, bad luck.
I apply that same principle when deciding what to write about for The Battleground. When I find great music that has very few plays on streaming platforms, I prioritise it over the work of better-known artists. Not because I am one of those people who revel in the willfully obscure—I listened to The Beatles more than any other band in 2025—but because most music critics feel compelled to write about the same new releases as everyone else.
That’s why Periphery + Progress is precisely the sort of record I want to write about. It’s full of compelling music that makes you question received wisdom about why some electronic artists made it big, and others did not.
In other words, this compilation is worth your time because it manages—borrowing from the undervalued Renaissance poet Philip Sidney— to both delight and instruct.
Photograph courtesy of Alan Denney. Published under a Creative Commons license.
