By Keith Walsh
With roots in the 80s, popular electronic music has focused on dark themes, broken hearts, and fractured societies. I asked Rodney Cromwell, whose new single “Opus Three” and upcoming album Memory Box injects a bit of optimism into the scene, why he thinks this is.
In an email exchange, Cromwell told me: “I think musicians that tend towards synthpop have futurist tendencies, and I guess as soon as you start thinking about the future too much it’s pretty easy to get a bit despondent. ‘Opus Three’ tries to pull us back from being pure dystopia; ‘Fon’t let it be, catastrophe’ being its central mantra.” Fair enough.
Cromwell continues: “As to why a lot of synthpop songs are about troubled relationships, well I guess if you’re singing about the end of the world and talking about synthesizers all the time, it must make holding down a stable relationship pretty difficult.”
The album Memory Box, mixed and co-produced by Rich Bennett, comes out on March 18, and it sounds to be a euphoric mix of dance beats, downbeats, and inspired lyricism. I asked Cromwell what was on his mind when he wrote the lyrics for the album’s second single. He tells me “’Opus Three’ was inspired specifically by Anna Kavan’s Ice. Kavan was a British novelist and painter and her book Ice is both a dystopian novel, but also has an other-worldly surreal post-modernism (feel) about it. It’s set on a world on the brink of destruction and when I wrote ‘Opus Three’ it was late February, early March 2021 when Covid was spreading across the world. I didn’t want to write about Covid, but snatching a few ideas from Ice gave me the right balance. It was originally called Aurora — like otherworldly fingers that stretch across the sky – but I realized there was a singer called AURORA so I changed it to ‘Opus Three’ after the synth I wrote it on.”
The tune “Opus Three” is named after the vintage Moog synth of the same name, the Opus 3. Cromwell uses vintage gear, including vintage synths and drum machines earning his music the designation ‘lo-fi.’
An avid reader, Cromwell went down the rabbit hole with texts that inform his upcoming album. As Cromwell tells me: “When I wrote the album, the books I had on my ‘inspiration shelf’ next to me were a couple of Kafka’s, Matthew D’Ancona’s book Post-Truth, Alice in Wonderland, the The Whitsun Weddings by Philip Larkin. I re-read Demons by Dostoyevsky in the summer of 2020 as well, that definitely influenced the album somewhat. And in terms of films while writing it, I watched a lot of Adam Curtis documentaries, a couple of Truffaut box sets, Sans Soleil by Chris Marker. Looking at that list, I’m surprised the album turned out as up-beat as it did.”
The album is indeed upbeat, belonging in the collection of fans of New Order, Depeche Mode, Goldfrapp and The Pet Shop Boys. Memory Box is out on March 18, on Happy Robot Records.
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