Ladytron’s Synth Life
Electronic music seems technological, and people think girls aren’t
as good at math,” says Ladytron’s Mira Aroyo. “But I’ve always been
pretty good at math. Some of our synths even have flow charts on
them. They’re really cute. They look good and sound good.”
Much like the Liverpool quartet itself. The group showcases
austere keyboard buzzing, mechanized beats and the robot-vixen
vocals of Aroyo and Helen Marnie, and they dress in matching black
uniforms that make them look like unusually cosmopolitan auto
mechanics. “I didn’t want to wear frilly clothes and asymmetric
makeup,” sneers Aroyo, who is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in
genetics at Oxford University.
The group’s co-founders, Danny Hunt and Reuben Wu, met at
Liverpool University in 1998 and quickly discovered a mutual
affinity for the vintage synthesizer. At the time, Hunt was
building a home studio filled with his collection of Seventies and
Eighties analog synths; the band now has more than twenty. But
Ladytron say the medium is not the message: Their goal is to make
music as lovely and droll as the Franqoise Hardy and Lee Hazlewood
songs they love.
So their second album, Light and Magic, is more than
just an anthology of cool sounds – the coy, sinister “Seventeen” is
a ready-made dance-floor anthem, with a winning hook and
unexpectedly gloomy lyrics. (“They only want you when you’re
seventeen,” sings Marnie. “When you’re twenty-one, you’re no fun.”)
Says Hunt, “We don’t want our music to remind anyone of
anything.”