I was just listening to the first Autechre album yesterday, and much of that's very sparse and cold-sounding - though I don't know to what extent 'sparse' overlaps with 'minimal' in the sense that Rich (or anyone else) intends.
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Also maybe checking out some early-to-mid '80s Cabaret Voltaire, i.e. after their electro-punk phase but before they went all acid house:
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Interesting that you don't want to listen to 'harsh' industrial or 'weak' synthpop, as Cabs from this era kind of falls in between those two camps. I mean, you could call a lot of it EBM, but it's a good deal less cartoonishly sinister and, well, 'gay-sounding' than most typical EBM of the period.