John Bender

John Bender emerged as one of the most enigmatic presences within the experimental underground of the early 1980s. Across that span he issued three albums and multiple cassettes filled with stark, minimal, and abstract electronic pop pieces that later attained legendary status among devotees of minimal synth and minimal wave. Born in 1950 in Nuremberg, Germany, he moved repeatedly during childhood before settling in Cincinnati. Although shaped by the Velvet Underground and the propulsive Motorik pulse of Krautrock bands such as Can, Bender worked with scant electronic equipment and began capturing experimental synth pop material in the mid-1970s. His first album, I Don't Remember Now/I Don't Want to Talk About It, appeared on his own Record Sluts label in 1980 and contained a version of Faust's "It's a Rainy Day Sunshine Girl." Plaster Falling followed in 1981, and Pop Surgery appeared in 1983. He also joined the performance project Johnny Vortex with Jason Tannen and Kate Gallion, which yielded a cassette in 1986. His recordings gradually attracted a devoted following among collectors and college radio DJs. Bootlegs of the LPs circulated while original pressings commanded steep prices on the secondary market. In 2012 the German label Vinyl-on-Demand released an official seven-LP retrospective titled Memories of Mindless Mechanical Monologues: 1976-1985. Superior Viaduct then issued separate reissues of I Don't Remember Now/I Don't Want to Talk About It and Plaster Falling in 2016.