Veronica Vasicka, founder of the Minimal Wave record label, claims to have coined the genre name.
She said in a 2009 interview, I had this collection of Dutch magazines from the early ’80s, and they kept using the terms "minimal electronics", "new wave", "coldwave" and a bunch of others.
"[2][failed verification] She identifies Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark's Organisation, Depeche Mode's Speak & Spell, John Foxx's Metamatic, Kraftwerk's The Man-Machine, Yellow Magic Orchestra's Solid State Survivor, and early Human League as influential in the development of the genre.
[4] According to Vasicka, the genre's hallmarks include minimal musical structures, relatively unpolished production, and the use of analog synthesizers and drum machines manufactured in the 1970s and 1980s.
Musicians in the genre were often influenced by avant-garde movements such as futurism and constructivism, and by the literature of science fiction and existentialism.