Propaganda

A Secret Sense Of Rhythm, A Secret Sense Of Sin

There are records that merely take a snapshot of an era. And then there are Propaganda, there's “A Secret Wish”, an album that, almost inexplicably, chose to anticipate it; a flash in the night, a fragment of the future that fell into the 1980s in the form of an electronic monolith that still vibrates today with an intact, almost unsettling force.

Forty years on, that lightning bolt returns to illuminate the present with “A Secret Sense Of Rhythm, A Secret Sense Of Sin”, an extensive six-CD box set – with corresponding versions on digital platforms – alongside a vinyl reissue of a new mix of the original album by David Kosten (Bat For Lashes, Everything Everything).

This release doesn't simply re-present the songs from the original tracklist; it dissects their very body, revealing fractures, discarded fragments, secret doors. It's like returning to a familiar building after years away and discovering corners you didn't remember, nooks that had never before come to light.

If we consider "Wishful Thinking", the remix album released just four months after "A Secret Wish", as a tasty appendix to the headline LP, and if we classify "1234" (1990) as a work credited to Propaganda in name only – featuring just Michael Mertens from the original line-up – the inevitable question is: how can a band with only one proper studio album to its name generate an archival work so vast and so eagerly awaited that it fills a release even the entire discography of many well-known acts couldn't sustain?

Pioneer Trevor Horn and the ZTT laboratory

The answer, in truth, is rather simple. "A Secret Wish" wasn't a record, it was an organism, a living, replicating, shifting creature; a universe that, today as then, keeps expanding, and to be fully understood it demands the patience to take a few small steps back in time, to around 1982, when Propaganda – then little more than an idea, an intuition, a shadow – were discovered by the visionary perfectionist Trevor Horn (Yes, Buggles, Art of Noise), who after hearing some demos immediately sensed their flair, their genius, their potential to shape into his most ambitious project: ZTT Records.

It all begins in Düsseldorf, the city that taught the world how music could take on different forms, home to Kraftwerk, to DAF, to metallic sounds and futurist, geometric concepts – the city where the founding nucleus of the group first came together as a trio: Andreas Thein, Ralf Dörper, Susanne Freytag, three incompatible souls who, precisely because of that, were perfect together, blending Thein's electronic fury, Dörper's conceptual thinking and Freytag's vocal theatricality.

But in 1983, everything changes.

At the invitation of her friend Freytag, Claudia Brücken joins the band, a voice as magnetic as a sheet of ice lit by neon. Not just a vocalist, but a co-writer, an emotional presence, the lens through which the lyrics and structures take on human form. Alongside her comes Michael Mertens, a classically trained percussionist, an analytical mind, a sound engineer. His contribution would prove decisive: it's he who takes the trio's raw material and turns it into solid, layered, cinematic electronic structures.

ZTT, founded in 1983 by Trevor Horn and Paul Morley themselves, was not a record label in the traditional sense: it was a conceptual laboratory, an aesthetic manifesto disguised as a label. And it was searching for a sonic identity, a shape, a language. It found it precisely in the German group Propaganda, in those embryonic versions of tracks such as "Dr. Mabuse" and "p:Machinery", raw yet already pulsing with a futurist, dark, intellectual energy, in the track "Disziplin", a radical reworking of Throbbing Gristle's "Discipline", and in a couple of other angular, fascinating episodes ("Sünde", "Radetzky March" and "Doppelgänger"), practically never presented to the public again, save for a handful of live performances and some bizarre posthumous release, now highly sought after by collectors.

Among those fragments there also circulated the mysterious "Sylvian's Machine", a 1983 demo that even featured David Sylvian on keyboards and arrangement, the direct embryo of what would later become "p:Machinery": a precious clue that within Propaganda everything was flux, exchange, alchemy. Sylvian himself remains, nonetheless, the protagonist of the synthesizer lines that open the official track, as well as of further contributions lent to other songs.

Horn had no doubts: Propaganda, the perfect embodiment of their baroque, conceptual, futurist poetics, would be the first act signed to ZTT, the label's founding cornerstone. And so it was. On 12 June 1983, Propaganda signed their contract, even before Frankie Goes To Hollywood, who put pen to paper on 1 September.

The first tangible fruit of the bond with ZTT is the track "Dr. Mabuse", released in July 1984 and conceived largely from Andreas Thein's ideas. It's a monumental debut: an electronic noir in song form, a parable of obsessions, shadows and seductions. A work that, on its own, would have secured Propaganda a rather enviable place on the scene of the time.

The late Thein (who died of cancer in May 2013) remains an almost mythological figure in Propaganda's history. A founding member, the architect of their first identity, the restless mind behind a phase in which the group was still magma in motion. If Propaganda's earliest sound possessed that raw, feverish electricity, it was above all thanks to him. That's why "Dr. Mabuse" resonates as something so unrepeatable: it's a sonic labyrinth steeped in his perception, a work that seems to breathe with a life of its own.

With ZTT's arrival, however, his instinctive spirit collided with Trevor Horn's highly structured vision. A philosophical divergence, even before a musical one. By the end of work on "Dr. Mabuse", the tension had exploded. Thein was asked to leave Propaganda over artistic differences, a decision in which one can sense the elegant but firm hand of ZTT. And yet, without that original spark, without his barbaric, emotional instinct, "A Secret Wish" could never have come into being.

While the band regroups and settles into the quartet formed by Brücken, Freytag, Dörper and Mertens, a new figure steps in destined to shape the album's aesthetic in depth: Stephen Lipson (Ultravox, Prefab Sprout, Eurythmics), producer and sound engineer at the Sarm West stable. Lipson's task is not merely to produce the excellent material at hand, but to shape it and place it within its own space, where Propaganda's contradictory electronics - velvety, yet also disorienting and dark - could unleash their full energy, turning harmonies into structures, reverbs into Gothic vaults, basslines into foundations and synth textures into load-bearing beams. Every track becomes a temple, and every mix an alternate room within the same place of worship. Then again - and this is an objective statement written into the history books - ZTT didn't record songs, it engineered visions. Morley created conceptual frameworks, slogans, literary references, and Horn built sonic universes, within which Lipson seemed to move like a sculptor of surgical precision.

Proof of ZTT's pioneering spirit has been passed down to posterity thanks above all to the results achieved on the ideas of Frankie Goes To Hollywood, Art of Noise, Grace Jones, and Seal's self-titled debut. In short, a perfect frame for Propaganda.

A journey in six stages

The narrative device mapped out by this sumptuous box set is divided into six stages, six variations on the theme of the Propaganda mystery, and six ways of observing, from different angles, the same body of work. ZTT chose to divide the material not according to strict philological criteria, but according to an idea: telling the story of what Propaganda were, of what they became, and of what they might have been.

It's no coincidence that the first of the six CDs is titled "Secret" and presents the original album in shifting form, almost a kind of encyclopedia of "A Secret Wish" split into two souls. The first is the analogue soul ("Analogue Sequence"), warmer, more physical, pulsing: mixed and mastered with less compression, mindful of the way an album was built for vinyl and cassette back in the 1980s. The second soul is the digital one ("Digital Variations"), colder, sharper, more cerebral, more detailed, a total reconstruction of the album, again carried out by Stephen Lipson, using digital equipment. It shouldn't be filed away as a mere remix, but rather as an alternative edit of the album, closer, if anything, to the remixes of the ZTT/Fairlight CMI school.

As an example, consider the gap between the two versions of "p:Machinery": the "Analogue Version" comes across as clearly electronic pop, while the "Digital" one has harder, more rhythmic contours, a genuine slice of club-industrial.

ZTT Records had a singular production philosophy: there was no single definitive version of an album. Trevor Horn and Stephen Lipson treated every track as material in constant mutation, shaped by different technologies: the analogue tradition (tape, physical mixing desks, natural compression) and the new digital frontier (Fairlight CMI, non-linear editing, multiple edits). The result was a kind of "sonic cinema", in which an album could have an analogue edit, warmer and more narrative, or a digital edit, more experimental and sharp-edged. "A Secret Wish" is one of the purest examples of this philosophy: two parallel, complementary albums, showing two identities of the same music.

The remastering carried out at Abbey Road Studios illuminates new depths, as if the album had been suspended in time for forty years and were only now coming back to life. The care taken by Ian Peel, the label's archivist and historian, is evident throughout: nothing has been left to chance. Every track included in this gargantuan release tells a fragment of Propaganda's sonic evolution, a piece of the relationship between band and studio, between idea and machine.

“Stahlnetz” is the title of the second CD, offering an expanded rendition of the so-called “Wishful Thinking” appendix, the remix album originally conceived as an alternative reading of the parent work, which here comes back to life as a long shadow, a hypnotic and restless dance, darker still than it was previously allowed to be. Paul Morley describes it in one striking line: “If 'A Secret Wish' is Abba in heaven, then 'Stahlnetz' is its infernal projection.”

The third CD (“Singlette”) brings together the material from the three cassettes “Do Well”, “Complete Machinery” and “(The Nine Lives of) Dr. Mabuse”, semi-legendary objects, small side laboratories in which ZTT and Propaganda played with alternative sequences, ghost versions, unrepeatable edits, track orders built as self-contained narratives. Each of these cassettes has, or had, its own reason for existing, but gathered together like this they reveal all the parallel lives of “A Secret Wish”, everything that happened alongside its official path, almost at the margins of its canonical history.

“Series” is the fourth chapter, devoted to the lineage of 12-inches from the thematic “Action”, “Incidental” and “Fatal” series — the realm of the most iconic and baroque ZTT, to which Propaganda too made a significant contribution, experimenting with new sonic languages, enigmatic interludes, conceptual sequencing, all assembled into monumental extended versions, among which stand out the electricity of the “Beta” and the majesty of the “Polish” version of “p:Machinery”, the fullness of the “Bittersweet” release of “Duel”, the sinister “Unapologetic” version of “Sorry For Laughing” and the long, elaborate suite “Die Tausend Augen Des Mabuse”.

This is the part of the box set that could be called the most “literary”, the most openly Morley-esque, where electronic pop dresses itself in philosophy and slogans.

In “Studio”, the second-to-last volume in the series, it feels as though we're stepping into the German band's workshop, where works in progress, drafts and mutations bring the listener close to the room where it all happened: the Sarm Studios between 1984 and 1985. Here the music is not definitive, it's still evolving. The tracks are still unripe, in the form of drafts, partial sequences, intermediate versions, ideas still white-hot, structures ahead of the final recording, and for that reason all the more fascinating for understanding the development of what would later become the finished product. There are moments where you can hear Mertens building rhythmic scaffolding, others where Brücken's voice appears as a blurred figure still taking shape, and others still where the handover from Thein to Lipson can be felt like a shift in the wind. This is the record of truth, the one that shows how every masterpiece is, first, a chaos waiting to be tamed.

The closing disc is “(Some Kind Of) Single”, the last echo of the ZTT era. The journey ends with a small relic, a previously unreleased version of “Dr. Mabuse” made for John Hughes' film “Some Kind Of Wonderful” (1987). A more narrative, more cinematic, more “American” Mabuse, as if the character had been lifted out of his nocturnal world and dropped into another story.

Alongside it come the TV and video mixes, ephemeral material created to be watched once and then vanish, resurfacing today as proof of just how pervasive Propaganda's language was, and how deeply it had seeped into even unexpected formats and contexts. A perfect close, one last breath of the ZTT era, the slow fade of a myth.

As mentioned at the outset, alongside the historical journey of the box set, ZTT chose to entrust a new version of “A Secret Wish” to David Kosten, as if the record needed to prove its vitality in the present day too.

His remix makes no attempt to replicate Lipson's baroque opulence, nor the percussive futurism of the '80s: instead he works by subtraction, opening up space, lightening the layers, letting elements breathe that in the original version were part of a denser mosaic.

The result neither replaces nor alters the myth: it observes it from another angle, as if the record were being filtered through the electronic sensibility of the 2020s. It's a smart move, perhaps less radical than one might have expected, but one that once again confirms the elasticity of a work born to keep changing.

The perfect illusion of “Duel” and the other hits

Every self-respecting album lives through its peaks, its high points, those tracks that become icons, emotional touchstones, guiding lines for navigating the sonic universe they belong to. It would be a serious mistake to close these pages without taking a closer look at the beacons that define the record's identity and tell its story in every shade: light, shadow, dream, threat, melancholy, ecstasy.

“Duel” is the flagship track: a luminous spiral, a pop whirlwind in which Claudia Brücken's voice isn't just singing, it's incarnation. It's Propaganda's most accessible side, their hand extended to the world, the bridge between the avant-garde, the radio and the sales charts. Bright but never naive, melodic but never tame, “Duel” is the perfect illusion, a song that seems to smile while concealing a subtle, almost invisible visceral fracture. Perhaps that's why it became the band's true commercial breakthrough (it reached number three in Italy), their open window, their point of contact with the world. Worth noting is the extraordinary presence of Stewart Copeland on drums. 

If “Duel” is light, “Dr. Mabuse” is darkness. It's the track that set the myth in motion, the first release for ZTT, the first true spark, the first real appearance of Propaganda as a self-contained sonic entity. Here electronics become dark theatre, the voice becomes confession, the sound becomes a hypnotic spiral. It's like watching a metaphysical criminal move through mirrors and digital smoke, a creature born from the meeting of Andreas Thein's anarchic instinct and the artistic sculpting of the other members, as well as Trevor Horn and his supremely skilled collaborators. It's the record's nocturnal side, wearing a restless mask with a black heart beating beneath it. Absolutely worth savouring, among the many versions on offer, is “Das Testaments Des Mabuse”, which across its generous ten-minute running time draws in every idea, every facet and every detail the band conceived for this little gem.

Often overlooked by the wider public but adored by fans, “Sorry For Laughing”, an oblique and hypnotic cover of the 1981 track by the Kafkaesque Scottish post-punk band Josef K, represents the open wound of the album. It's a song that whispers where others would shout, and in its murmuring it gathers more pain and more emotional truth than a thousand epic anthems. Brücken sings as if recounting a memory that's slowly dissolving, while the production remains suspended, elegant, vulnerable. It's an ode to fragility, and also one of the most intimate things Propaganda ever recorded.

“Dream Within A Dream” opens the album, based on a text by Edgar Allan Poe; a poetic and conceptual statement, a track that doesn't function as a mere introduction, but seems almost to plead for its own realisation. Here Propaganda show what sets them apart from any other band of the era: the ability to fuse visionary literature, the boldest electronic production and an almost ritualistic theatricality, like an entryway, a portal through which the German band seems to warn the listener of the arduous and imminent process awaiting them.

How could the analysis leave out “Frozen Faces”, the track that gave the box set its title (taken from a line in the lyrics), enigmatic and subtly unsettling, built on a rigid, glacial electronic pulse, where schematic synthesisers and dry percussion create an almost industrial soundscape. Claudia Brücken's voice slips inside it like a distant echo, more evocative than narrative, rendering the atmosphere cold, hypnotic, almost ritualistic, seeking no melodic hook at all, only suggestion: a small manifesto of the group's finely wrought dark sensibility, expanded in the box set through numerous variants, among which the take “A Secret Sense Of Rhythm”, from cd 5 “Studio”, stands out, further enhancing the track's original idea: pulsing, more layered, with deeper rhythmic work that brings out the electronic textures and the sense of a “mental loop” that is its unmistakable trademark. 

“Murder Of Love”, on the other hand, is the track that best embodies Propaganda's emotional duplicity. A rhythm that invites you to dance, a melody that caresses, a title that stabs. It's a perfect balance between sophisticated pop and lurking unease. It's like smiling while knowing that something is breaking. The structure is impeccable, the sound is expansive, and Brücken's voice is a steel wire wrapped in silk, elegant yet cutting. It's the track that holds together every soul of the record: ecstasy and pain, lightness and weight, seduction and danger.

It has long been mythologised that “Murder Of Love” had what it took to be released as a single, which is why many fans consider it the true cult track of Propaganda. As proof of the sheer depth of the artistic content and the calibre of those involved, this track too features a guest appearance you wouldn't expect: Steve Howe on guitar.

Then there's “p:Machinery”, something that transcends mere membership of an album, a magnetic force, a hypnotic solemnity, a movement unlike anything else. Its richness isn't showy; it's an electronic ceremony, a majestic flow in which the pulse becomes a pattern, the keyboards become gateways, and Claudia Brücken's voice becomes guide, spectre, promise.

Unlike the other pivotal tracks, “p:Machinery” seems to swallow you whole through a force born of a perfect short-circuit between music and meaning. The lyrics – a metaphorical meditation on individuals turned into cogs, on dreams installed from outside, on lives run like procedures – are inseparable from the sound, forming a single whole. The production, with its relentless march and metallic breath, seems to embody exactly what the words suggest: a society that shapes, directs, drags along. And yet, within this mechanism, a gap opens up, a spark of desire, of will, of resistance. It's a track that pulls you inside itself like a powerful wind, dragging you along without violence, guiding you as if it knew exactly where you needed to go. A rare balance between conceptual coldness and emotional warmth, a magnetic dance, a rite in motion. That's why, among all the sonic forms on the album, “p:Machinery” seems to have a different pulse, one that keeps beating long after the song ends, as if it had left part of itself vibrating inside the listener.

In the extended versions this feeling takes on an even more tangible form across the nearly eleven minutes of the mini-suite “βeta Wraparound” (cd 2), which, besides being the version favoured by longtime fans, is built by pushing the machine to its limit over a rich, vibrant, enveloping rhythmic engine. The structure is stretched out with elegance, never growing heavy, thanks to a deeper, more angular groove, more open instrumental dynamics and a more visionary use of effects, lending the song an irresistible cinematic allure, a form in which the track finally seems to break free of the constraints imposed on the shorter version released on the LP. Beyond the already mentioned presence of David Sylvian on keyboards, the track also features another notable figure, John McGeogh of Magazine on guitar.

“A Secret Wish” 40 Years On

If one small flaw can be found in this lavish and essential release, it's worth mentioning the absence of the live recording “At The Value Of Entertainment – Repetition Plus Variation”, available separately on digital platforms and recorded in London in 1985. In that performance, virtually the whole of “A Secret Wish” is played, with the help of some stellar collaborators such as Derek Forbes (Simple Minds) on bass and Steve Jansen (Japan) on drums: clear proof that these complex, layered sonic structures could be reproduced live with tremendous impact and without any loss of quality.

“A Secret Wish” is the perfect fusion of Germanic coldness, aching melodies, vocal theatricality and emphatic production, forged by a group that formed an unstable and highly explosive mixture.

Heard today, the album doesn't sound like a record from the ‘80s, and that judgement alone renders any further comment redundant. Its influence has been slow-burning and subterranean, yet steady, to the point of being regarded as one of the most important expressions of European electronic pop. This box set isn't nostalgia: it's a critical tool. Encountering two parallel versions of the album today means witnessing the exact moment when pop music turned into the art of sonic montage.

“A Secret Wish” emerges from this release more alive, more coherent, more visionary than ever. That's the paradox of Propaganda: their only true album is still the future of many others.

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20/04/2026