Wicked Witch is the recording-name of Richard Simms, a one-operator electro-funk catalogue working out of a Washington D.C. home studio across about 1979 to the mid-1980s. The catalogue consists of three known singles and one EP issued on Simms's own Infinity Records imprint (Infinity catalogue numbers F/W 22285, F/W 23071, F/W 23652) and a small number of additional recordings preserved on the 2007 EM Records (Osaka) reissue compilation Chaos: 1978–86. The Bureau files Wicked Witch at Tier III on the retroactive industrial-adjacent reading the Simms catalogue has acquired in the years since the EM reissue: the home-studio position, the primitive-electronic instrumentation, the deliberate refusal of conventional song-structure, and the lo-fi production-and-pressing vein place the Wicked Witch records, in retrospect, alongside the surrounding 1980s American outsider-electronic and home-recording private-press tradition.
The Wicked Witch catalogue's documented working idiom is one operator working alone across every musical part: Simms credits himself as songwriter, vocalist, producer, mixer, drum-machine and synthesiser programmer, guitarist and bassist on all of the recordings (with a small handful of additional contributions on individual tracks, mainly on Erratic Behaviour and X-Rated). The catalogue's direct musical referent is Parliament-Funkadelic, particularly the Maggot Brain and The Electric Spanking of War Babies manner: the long-form psychedelic-funk extended groove, the layered stream-of-consciousness vocal, the Bootsy-Collins-derived vocal interjection. Erratic Behaviour (1983) is the catalogue's clearest single example: a sustained drum-machine-and-bass-loop groove over which Simms layers a multi-tracked vocal-and-guitar palette in a Funkadelic-style outsider palette. Fancy Dancer (recorded 1985 by the EM reissue's dating) is the catalogue's most cited track: a Miles-Davis-electric-period-derived rolling electric groove with deeply-treated vocal layers, often described in later reissue-coverage as machine-funk.
The Wicked Witch position relative to the industrial-and-noise catalogue is one of retroactive adjacency rather than direct contemporary connection. There is no documented evidence that Simms was working in awareness of or connection to the early-1980s Washington D.C. punk and hardcore scenes (Bad Brains, Minor Threat, the Dischord cluster), or the surrounding American post-industrial moment that was then emerging through, for example, the Tesco / Maurizio Bianchi / SPK / Whitehouse cross-Atlantic exchange. The Wicked Witch catalogue is fundamentally a separate outsider-funk tradition that, by accident of working mode and instrumentation, produces records that read as industrial-adjacent at three decades' remove. The EM Records reissue and the later Boomkat / Soundohm / specialist-collector circulation of the catalogue from the late 2000s onwards has placed Wicked Witch into a Bureau-relevant frame that the original 1980s issuing-context did not occupy.
The 12-inch EP Electric War (1984, Infinity Records F/W 23071) is the catalogue's most significant document. The A-side contains Electric War (Instrumental) and the 12-minute extended workout Vera's Back (the latter actually a 1978 recording credited to Simms's ensemble Paradigm, here preserved as a continuity-of-operator entry); the B-side contains Nasty Boy and Electric War (Vocal). Vera's Back is the catalogue's earliest preserved recording and the only Paradigm-credited piece in the surviving Wicked Witch sequence; the Paradigm name otherwise does not appear. The Infinity Records imprint operated at private-press pressing-run scales (estimated low-hundreds-to-low-thousands per release across the singles); original copies of all three F/W catalogue items are documented as difficult-to-locate in the secondary market, and the EM Records reissue is, for the working researcher, the accessible document.
The wildcard filing reflects the Bureau's reading that Wicked Witch is not industrial proper in any 1980s sense: the records did not appear on any of the industrial labels of the period, were not part of any documented industrial scene, and do not deploy any of the form's signature operations (no tape-loop manipulation, no extended-feedback noise structures, no deliberate transgression-text materials, no aestheticised metallic instrumentation). What the catalogue does carry is a set of adjacent features (the one-operator position, the home-studio production vein, the primitive-electronic instrumentation, the refusal of song-structure, the genuinely-outside-the-industry economic-and-distribution position) that produce a retroactively-read industrial-adjacent profile. The wildcard designation modes this adjacency without assimilating the Simms catalogue to industrial proper itself: the catalogue is sonically a Funkadelic-extension outsider-funk position, structurally homologous to the industrial one-operator working positions of the period, and filed as a wildcard on the principle that the catalogue belongs to the present archive on structural-and-economic-homology grounds rather than sonic-or-historical ones.
The Wicked Witch catalogue's modern recovery happened through one channel: the EM Records reissue compilation Chaos: 1978–86, released initially as a CD in 2007 and later as a vinyl LP in 2008. EM Records is the Osaka-based reissue imprint specialising in private-press, outsider, and obscured-catalogue work from across the world; Chaos is one of the imprint's most cited American releases of the period. The compilation collects all six tracks from the three documented Infinity Records single-and-EP releases plus a handful of additional unreleased recordings, mastered by Koichi Hara from the original Simms tapes, with Simms himself participating in the reissue's production. The 2007–2008 EM reissue is, for working purposes, the catalogue's only continuously-available document; a later 2021 Lynx Rufus Recordings limited-edition vinyl (100 copies) reissued a slightly different track-selection with Simms's further direct involvement.
The Wicked Witch catalogue sits inside the surrounding American private-press outsider-funk-and-disco tradition the Bureau treats as continuous with the industrial-and-noise position through certain shared features. The closest comparable adjacencies, none of them industrial proper, are the records collected on the Personal Space private-press electronic-soul compilation (Numero Group, 2012), the Mickey & the Soul Generation / Numero Group outsider-funk reissue cycle, the surrounding Aaron-Hannibal / Hot Mustard / Pyramid private-press lineage, and the Sun Ra-adjacent home-studio cosmic-jazz catalogue of the 1970s. None of these adjacencies are industrial in the conventional sense; what they share with Wicked Witch is the home-studio one-operator position, the private-press distribution mechanics, the deliberate refusal of mainstream production-and-pressing standards, and the resulting catalogue-as-outsider-document idiom. The Wicked Witch records arrived in the Bureau's working-frame through this private-press direction rather than through any direct industrial-scene route.
The Bureau's position is that Wicked Witch is one of the archive's clearest cases of an outsider one-operator electronic catalogue that, on the strength of its working manner and economic position, reads as industrial-adjacent at retrospective distance even where the sonic content is mainly funk. The retroactive-adjacency framing is genuinely retrospective: the records were not industrial when issued, the operator was not part of any industrial scene, the labels and distribution networks were entirely separate. What the Bureau is filing is the structural homology between Simms's position and the industrial-tradition working positions of the period (Maurizio Bianchi recording alone in his Pomponesco home; Whitehouse's Come Organisation private-press operation; the early Tesco Organisation Hamburg home-studio operation), without assimilating Wicked Witch to industrial proper itself. The file exists in the present archive to palette the adjacency rather than to claim the form.
Filed by Bureau editor · VAGO · c. the postwar period · last revised c. the Reformation