Looking through club listings these days, many clubs claim to play electro. However, is it really electro? The term electro is regularly used to describe any electronic music that contains lots of synths or nu-wave influences. Originally, though, electro described a rather different type of music.

Afrika Bambaataa’s Planet Rock, released in 1982 and notably including samples of Kraftwerk’s Trans Europe Express and Numbers, is generally acknowledged as the first electro record. Originating within the hip-hop scene, electro was an electronic sub-style of hip-hop. As Wikipedia states, electro is defined by the “use of drum machines as the base of a track,” with the instrumentation typically all electronic and the vocals distorted, often by a vocoder.

It is this type of electro that Mark Walton chooses to tell the story of on The Story of Electro. Delving back into the early days of electro, right through to the present, Mark’s compilation provides a great introduction to what electro really is.

It comes as no surprise then that Mark includes Planet Rock, albeit George Acosta’s Back To Basics Remix released in 1998 (because as Mark says, you can get the original version on most hip-hop or electro compilations). Afrika Bambaataa and the Nebula Funk’s Mind Control is also included, remixed by funk wizard Danmass.

More old-school electro is dished up by Pieces of a Dream and Project Future. The very funky Mount Airy Groove from Pieces of a Dream melds together live drumming and rare groove melodies, while Project Future’s Ray-Gun-Omics features classic voice vocoding. Simon Harris’s Bass, How Long Can You Go is included, as well as the classic It’s Just An 808 from Bad Boy Orchestra.

More recent electro tracks come courtesy of DJ Sing, DJ Icey and Captain Funk. Two DJ Sing tracks are featured, the rapping Freaky Girl and the big basslines of Keep On Rockin It. Mark writes in the liner notes that picking just a single track from DJ Icey was hard (due to him having “crate loads of releases”), and makes do with the funky nuschool sounds of Sinewave ECB. In Search of Planet Robie from Australian producer Sereck, a member of Def Wish Cast, is also included.

One of the things that I like best about The Story of Electro is that Mark has chosen to leave the tracks relatively unmixed, with just some simple mixing between tracks. The tracks are left to speak out and tell their own story.