Besides listening to the new L&PT album on consistent repeat, I've been turning to a name that has been consistently on the rise for the past half year or so, Croatian Ilija Rudman. His music is what you might find if you looked up nudisco in a dictionary. It lacks the endearingly organic imperfections of disco from the 70s, but retains a supremely thick funkiness in the bass and guitar while applying a smooth layer of electric sheen cut with lasers. A lot of people have been buzzing about bouncey "In Motion" which you can still score over at 20JFG, but I picked up this release and have been quite content with how it moves me, plus it features a nice Faze Action remix. He's releasing more and more with each passing day so keep an eye out for him to make it big in the near future. Ilija Rudman - Dance Disorder (Faze Action Remix)
-> C.O.M.B.I. is supposedly a label of edits released by Eric?
What better than to follow a Harvey post with an edit by the mysterious label from Japan who most forums believe Eric Duncan is behind? I mean you can follow beard logic. This is edit H from the fourth installment in the series and this track is not for the lighthearted. This track is for late in the night when rolling tom fills and strung out dirty Sanatanaesque guitar solos echo through the smokey red light of the warehouse, or maybe for a cloudy afternoon on the bayou after you've consumed a lot of cough syrup. Epic discopsychedelia, enjoy.
Also these guys have been rocking my world the last few days and I have been sharing them as much as I can. This video is dope, but the video for "The Top" is realllllly good too. You can DL all their music for FREE here.
Well not really, Harvey's just coming to town, but it might as well be cuz he's practically playing in my back yard at Project One in the Mission/SOMA/Portrero area this Friday, and......... it goes til 4 so you can dance properly deep into the morning. Not so deep as at the Sarcastic parties, but this will most certainly suffice to make your weekend more awesome than it would have been sans Harvey. And even though it's outrageously famous among disco nerds and has been re-released on 160 gram vinyl (along with a lot of the Black Cock records), here is his epic edit that samples Jimmy "Bo" Horne's "Is It In" to prepare you for this disco adventure. Be there.
A quick post from the road in NZ. I have been listening to this release for a little while and I feel guilty for not posting it a little earlier because the rad dudes over at RVNG were kind enough to send me a copy. As you are hopefully already aware, RVNG Intl. has been releasing gold edits consistently for the last couple years and have featured a stunning lineup, including Lovefingers, Wade Nichols (Todd Terje), Mock & Toof, Jacques Renault, Betty Botox and Greg Wilson in addition to releasing regular mixes by Tim Sweeney and JD Twitch. Not to turn this into a name dropping post, but hopefully you get the point. I also regularly check the playlists they post monthly on their site.
Their releases to date have been consistently incredible and the latest, volume 8, features New York's nu-italo erotic masters In Flagranti, who also have a new album due out Brash & Vulgar. Unfortunately, there's no nudey cover for this release but it features two serious rock reworkings of Kiss' "I Was Made For Lovin You" and Slade's "Run Runaway"! Today I have chosen the charming disco lullaby titled "Stahl Rig", which as discogs informs us, is combined with the artist name on the release Petite Storm to clue us in on the original. I have yet to work it out, but maybe you can help? Here is the track, let it lull you sleep as the night drifts into the wee hours of the morning. The release is sold out on their site, but it is still available at Juno and a few other sites so go get it if you like!
Well, we are basically just, like, best friends with Lindstrøm and Prins Thomas, and when we’re not going out on double dates and playing Settlers of Catan together sometimes they’ll just, like, send us some music that they’re working on, because that’s the kind of relationship we have. Well—I mean—their publicist sends us the music. And, I guess, it’s not really, like, a lot of music. Just one edit. But: it’s a good edit! Straight from their new record, II, we’ve got the “Groove Edit” of “Rothaus,” which is track 2 on the album and a highlight for me.
The thing about II that you need to be warned about, going in, is that it’s, um, a jam record. Not Phish, haters, but, you know, second cousins. And—and this is hard for me to say—I’m OK with that. Really. On first listen, this edit doesn't do much: tightens the track a little bit, makes it easier to take in—and probably easier to dance to, in a sort of obtuse way—but it's hard to take something this "jammy" and straighten it out. So what you get is a lot of cautiously sloppy live instrumentation and synth noodling, which is what we in the biz call "rad." Perfect to listen to while cooking, jogging, throwing a coke-fueled week-long orgy, going to space (literally), going to space (figuratively), cleaning your house, etc.
And, you know, there was a time in my life when "jammy" shit like this would have received a derisive sneer and possibly an exaggerated roll of the eyes. I am no longer that small-minded person. In my old age, I think I can say—I think we all should say: I welcome the jam. And: guys: "Rothaus" is the jam. Enjoy.
NOTE: Founding partner Ash Williams is on a trip to THE FOURTH DIMENSION for the next couple weeks—he's going to try and post some from the road, but till then it's all me. Expect some Steely Dan, Pat Metheny, MP3s of me making fart noises, etc.
As I like to remind people who I know or meet on busses, my alma mater—Occidental College—was at one point home to literally thousands of important celebrities, including Barack Obama, Ben Affleck, Luke Wilson, The Guy From The Scissor Sisters, Jack Kemp, Terry Gilliam, and Jimmy’s Cousin. None of them seem to have actually graduated from Oxy, except for Jimmy’s cousin, but, you know, who cares. Here’s a question—how many current Presidents of the United States went to “Yale”? None. How many went to Oxy? All of them.
Anyway I’m just BRAGGIN to bring up Los Angeles recording artist NITE JEWEL, aka Ramona Gonzalez, Oxy class of ’09. I had a chance to talk with Ramona a couple weeks ago when she was in New York—she’s really nice and working on a thesis about HEIDEGGER, who is a famous “philosopher”—and wrote it up for Anthem (it's not up yet, but I'll link when it's live).
I think Jimmy & I discovered Nite Jewel via our ongoing Italians Do It Better standom (Ramona's put out a couple 12”s there after getting in touch with Johnny Jewel on MySpace), and she’s definitely got that IDIB bedroom disco feel—late-night music, a little woozy, a little dark. But even more than disco what I hear in her music is Freestyle, or "Latin Hip Hop," the disco-electro-rap-whatever that was all over urban radio for a few years in the mid-80s. Obviously not exactly (she's not, like, a Lisa Lisa)—but maybe her music bears the same relationship to Freestyle that Johnny Jewel’s does to Italo—a dusty shadow of a once-popular sound, now consigned to budget bins and collectors’ crates and hard drives and sad little blogs. It’s a terrific, evocative sound, and Ramona does an incredible job of maintaining that sort of bittersweet nostalgia across the entire album.
I was going to say that today (in New York, where it's raining), is the perfect kind of day to listen to Nite Jewel, but I'm not sure that's quite right—there's something specifically and intensely sort of Angeleno about her music, something I'm not sure I can put my finger on, but something that means despite its dusty memory-geared wistfulness, it's not a rainy-day album: I would argue, instead, that it's a smoggy-day album, music for carbon monoxide haze.
In any event, I’m not a freestyle expert by any means (for that you should check out this great blog, which is where I probably got the tracks I’m posting!), but I am going to declare today “Freestyle Friday” on Disco Horror, and leave you with a couple jams to help you greet the weekend. I don’t know enough about the acts or the music to properly introduce them to you—and yet somehow I think they’ll speak for themselves.
Soft Rocks has been tearing up recently. Actually, the Brighton-based group have been releasing funky music for a few years now. I have several of their records and while some are off the wall to the point that you probably wouldn't play them unless you were DJing and odd art gallery, others are incredibly inventive dancefloor-friendly monsters. I put "Slow Down" on my last mix from Umut 2000 because it was an amazing storm of acoustic guitars that made you feel like you were caught in the center of a virtuoso flamenco guitarist pissing competition. Other tracks are much more mellow, see the hypnotic african gospel of "Black Magic" and "Is This The Best Step For Father Africa" from Disco Power Play III, actually just see that whole release because it's rad. OR just check out some of their remixes of late for MGMT's "Of Moons, Birds & Monsters" or their remix collaboration with Kathy Diamond for Low Motion Disco's "Love Love Love", that for me was overshadowed unjustly by the Aeroplane remix that came out at the same time.
Their tracks are really all over the place so maybe it's no surprise that their new release heads in an entirely different direction. I can't really place where this lies genrewise but who cares, I think it's a beautiful track and the piano has been run through so many chorus, reverb, flanger and delay effects that it's ghostly repetition propels the whirring of percussion guitars and synthesizers that surround it to create the best nighttime, top-down, driving-in-your-convertible-on-an-LA-summer-night-contemplating-life-and-love music I've heard in a while. Enjoy this masterpiece and check out the rest of the release, it's called Essra.
I listened to the Byrds a lot growing up ‘cause my dad was a huge fan. Like the Beatles or U2 or whatever I think I internalized a lot of it without ever really processing it; the music of the Byrds such a normal part of my life growing up that I sort of didn’t even realize I had heard all of their albums (another thing like this, that I still fuck with to this day: the soundtrack to Until the End of the World, the Wim Wenders flick).
Anyway, my dad was always a Gram Parsons partisan (Gram was a member in a later permutation of the group, and died of an OD at age 26, with all the accompanying mythmaking)—so in addition to The Notorious Byrd Brothers there was a lot of Burrito Brothers and Grievous Angel and that kind of stuff. And, shit, I still love Gram and “$1000 Wedding.” But discovering Gene (who left the Byrds before Gram even joined) a couple years ago made me do a complete 180. I’ll never give up GP, but Gene is, like… next-level.
I spoke with Sébastien Tellier on the phone last week (read it here), and we talked for a minute about Clark, who he loves (in fact, Tellier’s all over that 70s Cali-country-psych-rock ‘scene,’ as it were, name-checking Dennis Wilson and the Mamas and Papas). It’s sort of weird that this white-suited bushy-bearded French lothario loves a Missouri-born wannabe cowboy, but I have some theories, ranging from the cynical (cokehead perfectionism) to the charitable (a shared love of excess).
Sébastien, whose music/persona/image I love, is of the opinion that Gene is more or less at the apex of some sort of grand pyramid of music—like, about as advanced as you can get—and while on the one hand I think that’s sort of bullshit, on the other hand I think it’s totally true. I’m going to see Tellier tonight and wanted to drop some Gene up in this bitch to help psych myself up.
Besides listening to the new L&PT album on consistent repeat, I've been turning to a name that has been consistently on the rise for the past half year or so, Croatian Ilija Rudman. His music is what you might find if you looked up nudisco in a dictionary. It lacks the endearingly organic imperfections of disco from the 70s, but retains a supremely thick funkiness in the bass and guitar while applying a smooth layer of electric sheen cut with lasers. A lot of people have been buzzing about bouncey "In Motion" which you can still score over at 20JFG, but I picked up this release and have been quite content with how it moves me, plus it features a nice Faze Action remix. He's releasing more and more with each passing day so keep an eye out for him to make it big in the near future.
