The Higher Primates, Human Error, The Scientific Americans

Proper out-there gear from Western Massachusetts in the late 70’s and early 80’s from Elliot Sharp and friends, documenting their outsider synth-pop/post-punk scene as it spilled out of local colleges into the towns nearby, featuring tracks from Human Error, The Scientific Americans and The Higher Primates. RIYL The Human League, Wire, The Pop Group.

While their contemporaries experimented with punk and new wave sounds, Christopher Vine, Elliott Sharp, James Whittemore and Nicholas Brown were fascinated with the possibilities that dub and techno might open up. They had access to a raft of gear thanks to Hampshire College and UMass, and used the arsenal to assemble a handful of tracks that sound prophetic. Vine and Whittemore (along with a few friends) recorded as The Scientific Americans, heading up the Tekno Tunes label (that released The Higher Primates’ only 7″) and deploying a single album, ‘Load and Go!’ in 1982. ‘Among Watt Bridge’ is a previously unreleased cut from just the duo, who muddle dub basslines with sickly drum machine grooves and wonked Funkadelic guitars.

All four friends join forces on the Human Error track, a loose-limbed dub-flecked jam that offsets handclaps and blunted bass improvisations with curled horn blasts. And it was Brown who headed up Human Error: the two tracks featured here were recorded in 1981 and never released, ‘Auto Music in the Disco Dub Style’ a nascent electro experiment that’s somewhere between ‘Rockit’ and ‘Planet Rock’, and ‘Teresa Experiments’ a Kraftwerk-cum-Radiophonic swirl of deadpan, vocoded voices, skippy 808 beats and outer-space synths.