Telex Announces New Box Set Release And Share New EP

Belgium synth-pop trio Telex has announced the release date of their six album box set, out April 14th, 2023, via Mute Records, shared their new EP, Telex EP3.

The Telex box set collates the long-awaited remastered reissues of their six studio albums, Looking for Saint-Tropez (1979), Neurovision (1980), Sex (1981), Wonderful World (1984), Looney Tunes (1988) and How Do You Dance? (2006). Remastered and newly mixed from the original tapes by Dan Lacksman (Hooverphonic, Thomas Dolby) and Michel Moers (Camouflage, Señor Coconut), Telex will be out as a six-piece vinyl box set, a six-piece-CD box set, and digitally.

The Belgian synthpop trio, Marc Moulin (1942- 2008), Dan Lacksman and Michel Moers, launched in Brussels in 1978 and, as one of only a handful of synth-pop pioneers at the time, helped bring electronic pop to the mainstream.  

Their new EP, Telex EP3, includes tracks from across all six albums, including “Something To Say” from their debut, the single “We Are All Getting Old” from Neurovision, “The Man With The Answer” from their collaborative album with Sparks, Sex, “Vertigo” from Wonderful World, “Spike Jones” from Looney Tunes and “Move”’ from How Do You Dance?

Listen to Telex’s Telex EP3 below

Their debut album Looking For Saint Tropez contains covers of Plastic Bertrand’s pop-punk “Ça Plane Pour Moi” and Bill Haley’s “Rock Around The Clock”, in which, so to speak, all of the rock is removed leaving nothing but the clock, a ticking, vocoderised, supremely deadpan robot parody of the original. Had Telex merely confined themselves to such covers they might have been regarded as a rather clever comedy band. However, they also cut “Moskow Diskow”, a rollocking, swerving, dancefloor classic which laid down the railroad for as yet unimagined electronic music like house and techno. Ahead of its time, the album’s reputation has only been enhanced throughout the years. 

The follow up, Neurovision, includes the track “Euro-vision” which was famously entered into the Eurovision Song Contest, representing Belgium. Moers says he regarded their entry as “very Situationist International, the worm in the apple.” and they resolved either to come first or last. They didn’t achieve that goal, but became part of the Eurovision saga. 

For 1981’s Sex the trio teamed up with Sparks, a match made in heaven given both band’s determination to make electronic pop music suffused with conceptual wit. They got along tremendously, Ron & Russell Mael staying on in Brussels far longer than they’d originally intended and Sparks contributed lyrics for the entire album.

Wonderful World followed in 1984 and the title track included here on the EP shows a band continuing to push a state-of-the art sound. 1988’s Looney Tunes, featuring the Dadaist cut-up “rap” of “Peanuts”, resulted in Motown among those vying to sign them. “It would have been great to have been the second white band on Tamla Motown. Iron Butterfly were the first.”, says Lacksman. That wasn’t to be, though, and the band instead worked on projects outside of Telex until 2006’s How Do You Dance?, an album that proves that Telex remained not only true to themselves but had grown with the new developments in musical software 

Telex announced their retirement in 2008 following Moulin’s death, but, in 2021 in partnership with Mute Records, the group released, This Is Telex, which featured two previously unreleased songs. The album is available on all streaming platforms.

The Telex vinyl box set is released by Mute, and includes a 12-page booklet and audio download code. Pre-order here.