Section A · What separated the three.

Same guitar, same drum kit, three arguments

Post-punk, goth and darkwave overlap almost completely in time, shared studios and in several cases shared personnel. What separated them was emphasis — what each decided to do with silence, with guitar, and with the rhythm section punk had stripped to its most functional. This section takes the three positions one at a time and locates each in a specific room.

Everything filed under A

• A 01Three genres came out of the same four years and refused to be the same thingPost-punk was a method — the same instruments, a refusal of the same arrangement — and goth and darkwave are what happened when parts of it turned toward atmosphere.
• A 02Same guitar, same drum kit, three argumentsThe instrumentation barely changed; what changed was what each scene decided the middle of a record was for.
• A 03Four songs in, one nine-minute take outBela Lugosi’s Dead was recorded in a single pass in 1979, and the length is the point rather than an accident.

The other three sections