Published
Wed, Nov 1, 2023, 13:30
- Let the Music Play: How R&B Fell in Love with 80s Synths is available through Velocity Press from February 5th.
A new book documents how synthesisers changed the sound of R&B, disco and funk.
Available through Velocity Press from February 5th, Let the Music Play: How R&B Fell in Love with 80s Synths explores how the genres were transformed by the explosion of music technology. It traces the work of everyone from Stevie Wonder and Herbie Hancock to Prince and Sade.
"Whenever anyone talks about the history of synth music, they've got this way of leaving most R&B out of it," said author Steven Vass. "They'll talk about how certain funk and disco tracks were really important to the development of house and techno, or they'll talk about how early hip-hop was influenced by the likes of Kraftwerk, but they say very little about the generation of R&B artists that went headlong into synths at the end of the '70s and made some of the best music I've ever heard. So I decided to write a book about it."
Pre-order Let the Music Play: How R&B Fell in Love with 80s Synths.
