Electro is the groove that just won’t stop. It began in the early 1980s with the 808 and Planet Rock, and it’s still being pressed to vinyl in Sheffield, The Hague, Madrid and Dallas today. Few people are better placed to map that journey than Neil Keating, aka Controlled Weirdness. He’s a South London DJ and producer who has been on the front line of club and sound system culture since the 80s, played on pirate radio, and now runs the electro label Presence Unknown and hosts the podcast Tales from a Disappearing City.
His new zine, The Icon Catalogue Electro Vol. 1, is out now from Southside Circulars and Velocity Press. It profiles 40 essential electro labels, from foundational New York and Miami pioneers like Tommy Boy and Cutting Records to today’s crop of underground imprints, with two essential records picked out for each. We caught up with Neil to talk about how the zine came together, what makes a label truly iconic, and what he’s working on next.
For anyone who doesn’t know you yet, how would you introduce yourself and your history in the electro scene?
I first got into electro in the early 80s, when I heard the StreetSounds compilations at school. It seemed like music from the future, and I started buying imports. I could only afford a couple each time, as they were £5 each, a serious amount of money then, but it started my addiction.
I lived in New York in the late 80s and also organised some early rave parties in Pittsburgh in 1991 and 1992. Whilst living in the States, I managed to pick up lots of rare original electro cheaply, as it wasn’t something that was seen as important then.
Through the 90s and 2000s, I started making and releasing my own weird take on electro and techno on various labels, including my own. Since then I’ve continued to DJ as well as release lots of music using a variety of classic analogue synths and drum machines in my South London studio.
How did you get involved in the zine?
I do a fortnightly radio show at Planet Wax, and Dexta – who runs the place as well as helps put out these zines – is a great friend of mine. He even calls me dad, as people often say we look alike, haha! He always said I was the right man for the electro one.
The zine opens by calling electro “the groove that just won’t stop” and tracing a line from the 808 and Planet Rock all the way to today’s labels. Was that continuity – old and new sitting side by side – the whole point of the project?
Yes, 100%. I wanted to have a mixture of the old and the new, as I love all aspects and eras of the music. Electro as a genre is always there, bubbling away throughout various phases. Sometimes it gets popular again for a few years but then retreats back to the underground.
You’ve landed on exactly 40 labels, running from Tommy Boy and Egyptian Empire right through to labels still releasing in 2025. How did you draw the line on who got in and who didn’t?
It was a really hard choice to pick just 40, so my apologies to those great labels I missed out. I basically picked some of my favourite labels, plus those I felt needed to be in the book because of their importance to the scene. No list is ever perfect, and these are just my personal picks.
Some entries here are giants with 100+ releases – Broktoys, Furthur Electronix, Mannequin – and others, like Electrobeat Records or Dataphysix Engineering, existed for barely a year or two but are still in the book. What makes a label “iconic” to you regardless of how long it lasted or how big its catalogue is?
For me, it’s all about being original and having your own sound. Dataphysix only had a few releases from Dopplereffekt, but they had their own Detroit-meets-Kraftwerk aesthetic that significantly changed the genre.
The Electrobeat tunes from the 80s were mostly produced by Dave Storrs in his garage in LA, but they released some seminal cuts such as Terminator by Kid Frost and Reckless by Ice-T. Some of the Dutch electro from The Hague had its own take on distorted, weird electro – as they described it, straight from the sewer.
The iconic labels play by their own rules and don’t follow – they create and innovate.
A fair few of these are labels you’ve run yourself or released on – Presence Unknown, obviously, but also your history with Unearthly. Was it strange writing about your own label alongside the ones that influenced you?
Yes, it did feel odd and a bit narcissistic writing about my own releases. That’s why those entries are a bit shorter, haha!
There’s real geographic spread here – Fort Lauderdale, Sheffield, The Hague, Madrid, Dallas, Russia. Was tracking down accurate information on some of the more obscure or short-lived labels, like Bound Sound or Interr-ference Communications, difficult?
As an electro nerd, I do have most of the music in this book, but having Discogs helps too. There was a golden era when you could pick up obscure releases cheaply, as most record shops didn’t know how rare some of this music was.
For a label like Bound Sound, which released some incredibly rare records in the early 80s in very limited quantities, there is virtually no information out there. I once had a chat with James McCauley, aka Maggotron, who released the incredible Computer Pop on Bound Sound in 1984, of which only 100 copies were pressed.
It is one of the most prized pieces in my collection. He told me the owner was an older guy who distributed lots of music in Miami in the 70s, and he’d have to meet him at gas stations to pick up the records – which, for some reason, were all pressed in very limited quantities.
Labels like Clone and Murder Capital lean heavily on the Drexciya/I-F axis, while others like Analogical Force or Plant43 Recordings sit in a more atmospheric, cinematic corner of electro. How did you think about representing the different sounds people call “electro” without the book feeling scattered?
For me, electro comes in many flavours and I wanted to represent that in my selection. There may be a couple of labels in this list that are on the edge of the genre, but I think the beauty of the sound is how it can be so different across eras and locations. I love Drexciya, of course, but not every electro tune has to sound like them.
On my first release on Unearthly in 1996, I scratched into the vinyl run-out groove “Fuck the Purists”. Every scene has its purists, but I believe the true visionaries create their own sound that moves everything forward.
Each entry has two “essential” tracks selected. How brutal was narrowing each label down to just two records?
That was very hard. I suggest everyone explores as many tunes on each label as they can. The two essentials are just starting points.
Between writing this, running Presence Unknown, and your podcast Tales from a Disappearing City, how do you split your time at the moment?
I’m making lots of music at the moment, and I also do my fortnightly two-hour radio show at Planet Wax, which is available as an archive with full tracklists on YouTube. I get sent a lot of new music, and I always say my plan is to play you some music you’ve never heard before.
I’m also busy planning new stuff for my podcast and YouTube channel. I’ve got lots of incredible guests lined up, as well as some other videos about underground subcultures and music planned.
As well as having close to 10,000 vinyl records, I have a huge collection of books, clothes and vintage magazines that I want to dive into, discussing them and creating videos about them. I also love vintage Massimo Osti and Stone Island clothing and want to find a way to bring that into the channel. Too many interests, too little time, haha!
What’s coming up next that people should keep an eye on?
I’ve got a track with Sync 24 on a Mechatronica compilation that is coming out later this year. It’s a slamming dark electro track with breaks and heavy bass.
I was also an advisor to the London Museum, which is reopening in November 2026. I helped them to create a room that celebrates the music of London from 1948-2012. This was great fun, as it covers a wide range of music and scenes, and I can’t wait to see it when it opens.
As mentioned before, there are lots of podcast and YouTube projects coming soon that I’m very excited about, so keep an eye on my YouTube channel and Instagram for those.
