What the Bureau files Cindytalk for is the bridge. Sharp's work runs from the 1980s 4AD orbit of post-punk and dark wave into the latter-day Editions Mego world of avant-electronics, with the post-industrial drone-and-texture of the late records as the main reason it is here.
Cindytalk formed in Edinburgh in 1982, largely as a vehicle for Gordon Sharp after The Freeze. Sharp had sung in The Freeze (Edinburgh post-punk, active c. 1978 to 1981, best known for the singles In Colour, 1979, and Paranoia, 1980) through the late-1970s and early-1980s Scottish post-punk moment. Edinburgh's scene of 1980–1982 · the Postcard Records circle around Josef K and Fire Engines, the Sound of Young Scotland · sat near but apart from where Sharp would take the new band. The 1982 formation moves him out of that Postcard-and-Edinburgh world and into the UK 4AD-and-Midnight-Music orbit of post-industrial and dark wave coming together at the time.
Signing to Midnight Music in 1983–1984 (Nick Ralph's post-industrial and dark-wave label, which also handled And Also the Trees, Sad Lovers and Giants and much of the period's dark wave) set the band on record. Camouflage Heart (1984, Midnight Music CHIME 00.16), the debut LP, put it down: dense post-industrial texture and electronics under song forms, with Sharp's voice as the melodic and dramatic lead, in much the same range as the Cocteau Twins' Elizabeth Fraser, Dead Can Dance's Lisa Gerrard and the other 4AD-orbit voices. It stays in song form throughout, but with the kind of atmospheric, textural foreground the 4AD records of the period (Cocteau Twins, This Mortal Coil, the early Dead Can Dance of 1984–1986) worked alongside.
The This Mortal Coil work of 1983–1984 is the band's main 4AD link. Ivo Watts-Russell (4AD's founder) put TMC together in 1983–1984 as a rotating cast of 4AD and adjacent singers and players working to his curatorial ear rather than as a fixed band. It'll End in Tears (1984, 4AD CAD 411), the early TMC LP, gathered it into something atmospheric and affecting, with Sharp featured chiefly on "Sixteen Days / Gathering Dust" (the second track on side A, the Modern English cover reworked through TMC) and a few other tracks. His falsetto and extended singing on those contributions set his place in the 4AD orbit, and remain the first reference point for readers arriving from post-punk and dark wave.
In This World (1988, Midnight Music), the second Cindytalk LP, opens the sound out. More orchestral and classical instrumentation, more sustained dynamics, song form kept but with much fuller atmospheric and instrumental writing around the voice. It marks the move out of the Camouflage Heart approach toward the dark ambient and drone that would settle in across the 1990s and 2000s. The Bureau treats it as the band's mid-1980s turn and the bridge into what follows.
Wappinschaw (1995, World Serpent Distribution), the long-gestated third LP, came out through the post-industrial and neofolk distribution network of the period. World Serpent · the main distributor for 1990s Coil, Current 93, Death in June and Nurse With Wound · placed Cindytalk in a quite different setting from the early 4AD and Midnight Music world. Its seven-year gestation shows the shift from song toward long form: the record sets drone and texture against leftover song elements and a good deal of Scottish-traditional and folk material. The Bureau treats Wappinschaw as the key mid-period record and the turn toward the later dark ambient.
A hiatus across the late 1990s and early 2000s (Sharp working mostly on other collaborations and film soundtracks) preceded the Editions Mego years. Editions Mego · the Vienna avant-electronic and contemporary-classical label founded in 1995 by Peter Rehberg, home to Christian Fennesz, Jim O'Rourke and Pita · signed Cindytalk in the mid-2000s as part of its turn toward post-industrial and dark ambient. The Crackle of My Soul (2008), Hold Everything Dear (2009), Up Here in the Clouds (2010) and the records since settled the late-period sound: sustained drone and atmosphere, voice as occasional texture rather than lead melody, long form rather than song. The late work is quite distinct in feel from the early songs.
Where it sits: the Bureau files Cindytalk at Tier II, primarily under F·17 Dark ambient for the late work, with F·11 Industrial proper alongside for the early records. The 1982 Edinburgh formation out of the 4AD orbit, the 1984–1988 Midnight Music records, the This Mortal Coil link on It'll End in Tears (1984), Wappinschaw (1995) on World Serpent, and the Editions Mego years from 2008 are the main filings. The band is still active in 2026, in its fifth decade.