The Comateens’ “Danger Zone” and “Elizabeth’s Lover” are being reissued by Left for Dead, a label with a long connection to both the band and their original guitarist Ramona Jan. The tracks will be released on CD (with gatefold sleeve), 12” LP vinyl, and digitally via Bandcamp on November 21. The 12” will be a limited, very collectible release with 90 copies on orange vinyl and 200 on black vinyl.
The Comateens were one of NYC’s earliest synth-punk bands, along with Suicide and Kraftwerk one of the few live bands to perform with a drum machine. Jan and North formed the band in 1978, bonding over their shared love of merely playing music together and the punk rock scene taking shape in downtown NYC. Singer and synth player Lyn Byrd and drummer Harry Viderci joined shortly afterwards.
Both cuts were recorded at Mediasound in 1979 with Jan on guitar, Dembling on bass, Byrd on synths and Viderci playing drums. Don Wersheba and Harvey J. Goldberg engineered; Ray Janos was the mastering engineer.
The band was able to record at Mediasound because Jan was an audio engineer there, one of only a handful of women engineers in the world.
“I’m amazed at how contemporary Danger Zone sounds after all these years.”
“I love the orange vinyl and think the record company did a great job with the original artwork and the square-shaped poster of us at Hurrah.”
“This release has offered the opportunity of Nick and I getting back together and, in a sense, forgiving each other for what went down when I left the band. We really hadn’t talked since that day in ’81, I think it was? Now we’re talking pretty regularly about so many things. Putting the pieces together of a broken band. And who knows where it might all lead.”
Ramona told MUNDANE
