Mr Rhyu presents “Inches”: A collection of sounds from 1980s porn productions

Tracks included in the hour and a half-long show cover a variety of genres such as Berlin school, ambient, leftfield, abstract disco, new wave, early electro, post punk and EBM.

The main issue when retrieving music used in porn is that the vast majority of producers were composing these soundtracks half-heartedly, as side projects to raise money and finance their main artistic careers. For this reason, most of the compositions in these films are hardly identifiable and boldly arranged, yet often sounding great due to the machines and recording techniques available at the time.

This is the case with two of the tracks included in “Inches” which were recorded in the mid 80s by Spider Taylor, who sadly passed away in 2015, and producer Steve C.

Spider was the guitar player of the new wave / post-punk Los Angeles band Red Wedding, who composed “Chordspace” and “L.I.A.D.” as soundtracks for porn movies directed (and performed) by Al Parker – a mythological figure in the 80s American gay scene. These previously unreleased tracks are extracted from a tape which was kindly provided by Michael Ely, singer of Red Wedding and husband of Spider Taylor.

As one no doubt realises when scrolling through the tracklist, there’s nothing extremely obscure in the music choice here. The reason for this is that the recognisable tracks in 80s porn, for which information about a title or an artist could be easily retrieved, were unsurprisingly intertwined with the pop culture of the time and survived the test of time.

Music for “Inches” was selected by Mr. Rhyu. Voice narration by Becca.

“Pornography is literature designed to be read with one hand” – A.L.