The Guestlist w/ Toby Pipes

It's Thanksgiving week and there are an abundance of Guestlists in our backlog to be thankful for. It's a veritable cornucopia if you will. Today's list comes via Toby Pipes of Little Black Dress. My first memory/awareness of Pipes and his work was meeting Mikey behind John F. Kennedy middle school after class one day back in 1996 to trade my copy of Tripping Daisy's, "I Am An Elastic Firecracker" for his copy of Deep Blue Something's, "Home" --Pipes of course being DBS's guitar player.

While time has proven it wasn't necessarily the greatest decision of my life, it wasn't a total wash either. In the years since Pipes has gone on to found Bass Propulsion Laboratories, one of the finest recording studios around, as well as teaming up with Nolan Thies to form the band Little Black Dress. Their debut LP released back in March was not only the inaugural release for Idol Records imprint Exploding Plastic, it was also one of the year's better local debuts.

"My Top 5 Synth/Keyboard Bands of the Late 70's and Early 80's" by Toby Pipes

5. Depeche Mode (English): Over 75 million records sold...

4. Ministry (American): I felt like I needed an American artist and Al Jourgensen is a genius. "Twitch" was a life changer.

3. Front 242 (Belgian): Blending industrial sounds with soundbites/samples... "Hey Poor!"

2. Tubeway Army/Gary Numan (English): He's the 'king of synthpop'.

1. Kraftwerk (German): Without these guys everything would be different now.

(Honorable mentions: Cabaret Voltaire, Yaz, Heaven 17)


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