A catalogue of recording decisions, not a record collection

IKON Domain covers post-punk, goth and darkwave as recorded objects — the studios, the labels and the machines that made them sound like that.

Three genres came out of the same four years and refused to be the same thing. The sequence is documented and tighter than the mythology suggests: Joy Division at Strawberry Studios with Martin Hannett putting silence and space where a rock producer would have put guitars; Bauhaus cutting a nine-minute take at Beck Studios in Wellingborough in 1979; the labels — Factory with its catalogue numbers for everything it touched, 4AD with the sleeve designs that decided how the records looked, Mute with the synthesiser lineage.

The pages here describe records as made objects, with their dates and their credits. A gated reverb, a chorus pedal and a cheap drum machine did specific things to specific signals, and that is where the writing goes. Every page carries a catalogue number in one of four series; the archive lists all of them.

How the numbering works

Factory gave a number to the flyer, the nightclub and eventually the liquidation. The same habit organises this site: four series, lettered A to D, one per section, and every page numbered within its series. The number is the address, and it is printed wherever the page is named.