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Moodymann

Dimitri From Paris – Night Dubbin’

Posted on April 20, 2018 @ 10:00pm by Coqui

Dimitri From Paris presents Night Dubbin' (Mixed by The Idjut Boys

(BBE: 2009)

Nearly ten(!) years ago this little package came tumbling out into the shops with little fanfare, brought to you by the good folks at BBE. It's a sprawling selection of 21 shimmering dancefloor dubs from the first half of the 1980s, brilliantly compiled by Dimitri From Paris across two discs in original unmixed form, while The Idjut Boys mix the third (playing the soundboy to Dimitri's selector), all lovingly presented in an indispensable 3½ hour anthology (recalling Dimitri's Disco Forever triple-disc extravaganza).

Whereas that set chronicled peak-era disco by the likes of Charanga 76 and D.C. LaRue, Night Dubbin' shines the limelight on the time period just after. Post-disco and pre-house, the music captured here is a spectral, electro-tinged dance music imbued with half-lit neon glow. This is the sort of thing one might have heard at Tony Humphries' Zanzibar and Larry Levan's Paradise Garage (indeed, this is the genesis of the sound that would come to be called garage), where the sounds of disco mutated into the forms that would light the fuse on the Second Summer Of Love.

Touching down with the reverb-soaked acapella vocals of Aurra's Such A Feeling (Part 2), you're hit immediately with the sort of organ line that would come to define large the garage sound in years to come. However, a delicious electroboogie squiggle enters the fray to complicate matters with spiral synths twisting and turning in orbit around the track's crisp percussion. That right there gives you a great thumbnail of what to expect here, so if that sounds like a good time to you, then feel free to proceed with the knowledge that you're in for a treat.

With The Idjuts segueing smoothly into Thug Rock (Chimental Mix) by Sandy Kerr, the final crucial ingredient of today's journey takes center stage: I'm talking about low-slung, deep-grooving slap bass magic. Together with the dubbed-out vocals, garage-inflected keyboards, wasp-leg synths and that rolling 1980s drum matrix, all the elements are present and correct. There's even this whistling, high-pitched synth that prefigures the sound of mid-nineties digital-era Detroit techno figures like Kenny Larkin and Stacey Pullen (particularily the Silent Phase record). That's actually not uncommon in this mix, where one will often do a double-take on some fragment of a track (or idea within it) that sounds utterly ahead-of-its-time.

Suddenly, incandescent synths drift into view with an almost steel drum, calypso flavor. Island disco vibes to a man. This is the Limited Edition Special Remix of Serious Intention's You Don't Know. I have the original version on 12", but this remix takes the track in a radical new direction. What were once relatively straightforward soul vocals in the original version are now fed through what sounds like a harmonizer, pitched-up and mutated into smurf territory. This is the sort of dancefloor psychedelia that Prince was perfecting around this time, going to show the continued usefulness of Eno's concept of scenius. Something In The Water (Does Not Compute).

It's worth pointing out that You Don't Know was one of the foundational building blocks of garage, which when you connect the dots forward fifteen years to the So Solid Crew's They Don't Know becomes all the more fascinating. It's a continuum, folks! And as in The Matrix, once you see the connections they're with you to stay.

Collapsing into the hall of mirrors intro from Michael Wilson's Groove It To Your Body (Instrumental Mix), it's not long before you're flooded with rolling waves of clavinet funk like a fast-forward Stevie Wonder (one pictures the cyborg keyboardist from Vibrations in action). The only respite is a cool breeze of cascading chimes, still rapid-fire but serenely so, before the bridge hits with a snatch of breezy acapella and then you're back in the thick of the clavinet jungle.

Shades of Nu Groove-esque moody atmosphere announce Lenny White's My Turn To Love You (Dub Version), a streetlight moonlight foray into post-jazz funk boogie. Yet another track fueled by clockwork slap bass, the tune's moody rumblings ultimately get subsumed into the track's metronomic forward motion. Shards of synth creep through the tune's murky aura, giving the track that extra punch as outer space effects unfurl at the edge of the soundscape, looped sax trilling off onto the horizon.

This from Lenny White's 1983 LP Attitude, which also has the twilight burner Didn't Know About Love (Til I Found You), finding the erstwhile fusioneer (and member of Return To Forever) keeping up with the times and rolling deep with the Jamaica, Queens crew (see also Don Blackman, Bernard Wright, Tom Browne and of course Lenny White's own Twennynine project).

Aside from Easy Street, if there's one label that fits the remit of this mix then it's Prelude. And who better to represent the label's trademark post-disco machine boogie than James "D-Train" WilliamsYou're The One For Me defined the sound of the era's machine funk (even as Jam & Lewis picked up the baton and ran with it)? In this case, you've got the stellar dub of the "D" Train Theme, also from the You're The One For Me LP, which picks up where that record's genre-defining title track left off (albeit with a greater presence of funk guitar and even a little proto-rap worked in for good measure). If there's one figure here that you could claim to be the founder of this feast, than it would be old D-Train.

With the Theme shimmering out across a pulsing electro-bass riff, the Paul Simpson Connection is in full force with Treat Me (Dubmental Mix). Like the Aurra track, this is very much a proto-garage moment, with that skipping hihat rhythm underpinning club pianos and soulful keyboards. Gradually building before it all explodes in a crescendo of intricate synth filigree and dubbed-out, churchy vocals, it maintains a vibrant elasticity throughout. That rubberband synth bassline practically glows in the dark.

Ever so subtly swinging one bassline to another, The Boys drop into Wuf Ticket's The Key (Dub Version), an electroboogie masterpiece driven as much by a rhythmic vocoder loop as much as the beat itself. There's vocals happening on something like three or four planes, with a baritone voice rising from the cracks in the beat as synths shimmer above it all, falsettos rising from within. Interesting to note the appearance of another jazz funk luminary, with James Mason (the man responsible for the sought after Rhythm Of Life LP) making his presence felt in this shadowy electro crew.

Like a line drawn in the sand, Radiance's You're My Number 1 (Dub) announces its presence in the mix with a soulful keyboard line before dropping into a mass of descending chorused guitar, and suddenly you can just feel that you're about to be hit by something drastically different. That guitar - sounding not unlike one of Jungle's luminescent six-string figures - cuts a rakish angle across the track's electroid bass'n'boogie, while Andrea Stone's vocals echo ethereal in the distance. When it all drops into that unadorned mid-section, grooving on a simple organ refrain, it's as if the 90s have come seven years too soon and you're soaking up the purest uncut garage down in Jersey. Either that or a Moodymann record. Which hooks up brilliantly with the next record...

Raw Silk were best known for Do It To The Music (with its immortal music's hypnotizing refrain sampled seemingly hundreds of times over the years), but instead are showcased here for their other record on West End, Just In Time & Space (Dub). Like it says on the tin, this is spaced-out dubdisco shot through with swirling interplanetary sonix and disembodied girl group vocals, sporting an electronic sequence that predicts techno's minimalist streak before exploding into an absorbing chorus starring verdant synths and the funkiest of piano rolls.

All things considered, this might very well be the superior record to Do It To The Music and in it's . Like Marvin Gaye's Trouble Man OST, it's a record seemingly made with another era in mind (an era whose time had yet to come). It very well could be the most forward-looking song here, it's vast, hollowed-out stretches of atmosphere predicting techno's trajectory as the 90s progressed.

With the outerspace sonix disintegrating into a cloud of stardust, Mikki's Dance Lover (Dub Mix) slips onto the scene with the sort of bassline that Metro Area would kill for. Indeed, this whole mix gives a bit of context to the uninitiated for all those Metro Area records: this is the sound that Morgan Geist was pining for (also check the excellent Moves EP, a personal favorite of mine from the man's oeuvre). The track is pure skeletal perfection, like Kraftwerk or Isolée... just perfect. When those electroboogie synths creep into the mix - disembodied vocals drifting out into the ether - the whole thing crashes through the heavens and sails across the stars.

Well... something has to follow what might be the most sublime moment here, and that tune is the instrumental of Electrik Dred's Butter Up (Gimmie Some Bread). Another vocoder-fueled electo-bass odyessey, it rides a loose rhythm matrix into the island boogie of Cloud's Steppin' Out Jam (Special Instrumental Dub Version), with its flanged guitars feeding into the track's motorik propulsion this is the most four-to-the-floor moment here. In fact, its most minimal moments sound just like something out of an acid techno mix circa '95 (Plastikman's Mixmag Live!, for instance). Both these tunes serve to offer something of a breather before the last two tracks kick into high gear and all the rules get broken accordingly.

Surfing in on the derezzed collapse of Cloud, the RAH Band's offbeat European boogie comes crashing in at a lackadaisical pace, seemingly fifteen BPM slower than anything helse here. Clouds Across The Moon strolls along with that moonbounce beat, bassline pulsing in tiny low-gravity arcs as sunshine guitars wander lonesome up and down the soundscape. As if beamed in across interplanetary transmitter, the wistful strings of some old-time orchestra drift across the stars as Nelson Riddle were conducting from orbit. When it all reaches its crescendo, with those trilling hi-pitched synths almost sounding like something from Super Mario World, it's as if your locked in some yearning romance transpiring within the reality of some deserted arcade machine. The Super Nova Mix is a dubbed-to-pieces rendition of the original 12" version, which was a paean to a lover stranded on Mars (or is he?).

The biggest surprise here is saved for last, with a track originally from Wham's first album closing out the set. Enjoy What You Do (Wham Rap) (Vocal) finds George Michael rapping over a sunny bit of island funk that builds into frenzy of slap bass, chicken-scratch guitars and soaring brass, electroid synths weaving through it all as drums crash with wild abandon. You could just picture this in the final scene of some contemporaneous movie - say a comedy with John Candy, Shelley Long, Robin Williams and/or Bill Murray - and everyone's getting down at the big party before the end credits roll. If pressed, I'd volunteer that it rivals Everything She Wants, although I haven't been able to find this particular version anywhere (none of the others are nearly as good this one). A leftfooted swerve from the seemingly kitsch to the sublime, it's a rather fitting end to a visionary mix that reclaims an era's music that people would have scoffed at as tacky and/or dated twenty years ago. Maybe they still do? Well, at least you know better...

What I'm really getting at is that this whole package, from the presentation on down to the extensive liner notes and of course the music within, is that it really hammers home the idea that the wildest strains of 80s dance - post-disco and pre-rave - were the era's head music par excellence. It's something that dawned on me years ago when first confronted by the music of Kleeer and Mtume (to say nothing of Hashim's Primrose Path, Model 500's Night Drive, Mr. Fingers' Can You Feel It and Reese's Just Another Chance). It's a terribly evocative music, stripped to it's essence, yet possessed of visions of the stars. It's music to dream to and music to dance to... but most of all it's music to live to.

The Parkway Bowl Disco Mix

Posted on April 7, 2018 @ 11:15pm by Coqui


Back in the day, I worked at the Clairemont Library, shelving books and helping patrons. Stimulating work, to be sure. On my lunch break, and occasionally after hours, I'd walk a couple blocks over to the Sunset Bowl to grab a bite to eat, play video games and lay out the plans for Mettrex Recordings. After all, this is where Soul Machine's Essential Funk Files were born. Good times. The general vibe in prevalence was sun-glazed and tropical, which meant of course that it was right up my alley.

There was a DJ booth near the bar that was all done up tiki-style, and I'd always dreamed of spinning disco at the midnight bowling sessions they held on Friday nights. Records like The Incredible Bongo Band's Apache, Freddy Fresh's Roller Rinks & Chicks, Loose Joint's Is It All Over My Face, Paperclip People's Floor and Stereo MC's Rhino. You know, basically the good good. It was a good dream, but alas the place closed down before I had a chance to hold court in the mix. Now, an apartment complex sits where the bowling alley was once comfortably nestled...

The other bowling alley where I spent a lot of time - and did most of my actual bowling - was the Parkway Bowl, down in El Cajon. I most recently hit the lanes again with my brother Brian and cousins Isabel and Joelle a couple weeks ago to discover that the venue hosts something called Cosmic Bowling, held in a backroom with psychedelic lights and dedicated lanes for the renting. Brian commented that it was like something out of Kingpin...

It all brought me back to hours spent at the Sunset Bowl, dreaming up the future, and as is often the case a whole lot of records began to conjure up in my mind. One thing led to another, and I ended up doing a little mix. Within the confines of this two-hour excursion, you'll find dubdisco, new wave, Philly soul, French disco, hip hop, boogie, Italo disco, punk funk, gulf stream and disco-not-disco, all anchored to a bedrock of largely straight up disco in the Chic tradition. It's all of a piece.

No attempt was made to be historically accurate; there's anachronisms all over the shop, because this is a 2018 disco mix - unapologetically so - filled with music that lived well past its era to fuel dancefloor mayhem through the intervening years and still sounds cutting edge some 33 years on.

So without further ado, I give you...

The Paradise Bowl Disco Mix

The Tracks

  1. The Parallax Sound Lab New York City Intro

    2. Welcome to the show, featuring James Woods, master of ceremonies.

  2. The Mike Theodore Orchestra Moon Trek (Westbound)

    3. Kicking off with the orchestral soul of Moon Trek, from arranger Mike Theodore's Cosmic Wind LP. Mike Theodore actually from Detroit - not New York - but the track does seem to conjure up images of the Big Apple. He not only produced Rodriguez's enshrined Cold Fact (alongside frequent collaborator Dennis Coffey), but also a brace of sides for the Detroit Emeralds. In between, he put out two excellent LPs of instrumental disco (of which this is the first) that remain cosmic disco par excellence.

  3. The Clash The Magnificent Seven (CBS)

    4. Which brings back memories of driving to Patrick Henry back in the late 90s. This jam kicked off all manner of C90s during that period, soundtracking the crisp, early-morning drive to school. The album version, from the triple-LP Sandinista! is where it's at, featuring ever more lush production and further discotheque sonics in evidence throughout. The Clash were cool. I've always assumed that this and Radio Clash were their take on the early Sugar Hill hip hop sound.

    Part of what was great about disco is how it ultimately pulled anyone and (nearly) everyone into its orbit, from Marvin Gaye to The Rolling Stones, throwing up all sorts of possibilities and drawing unexpected sounds out of leftfield (making something like Disco Not Disco a necessary intervention, bringing together a whole raft disparate material together under its umbrella). Nowadays, it serves as shorthand for whole swathes of music. Kevin Saunderson later mined this record for Reese's awesome You're Mine, rugged Detroit techno of the highest caliber.

  4. Démis Roussos Midnight Is The Time I Need You (Philips)

    5. Luxuriant sun-glazed disco from Greek balladeer Démis Roussos, who of started out in art-prog band Aphrodite's Child alongside synth ambassador Vangelis before striking out on a long and winding solo career. This from '75 finds Roussos with an early entry in the disco canon, with gruff, soaring vocals holding sway over a lazy mid-tempo groove. Dig those gently psychedelic organs! Far and away the best tune on the Souvenirs album, although I have a hell of a soft spot for the motorik country-western vibes of Tell Me Now. Great sleeve too!

  5. Martin Circus Disco Circus (Prelude)

    6. When the chips are down, my favorite disco record. Laying the blueprint for Daft Punk, Cassius and Motorbass, this is French disco par excellence, with François Kevorkian reworking the fourteen minute album version by erstwhile-psych rock band Martin Circus into a seven minute rapid-fire edit replete with electro-boogie synths, soaring guitar solos, Moroder-esque sequences, group chants, rolling basslines, a second-line horn section and backing scat vocals that sound something like Bing Crosby duetting with Dieter Meier. I think the kitchen sink is in there somewhere.

    Props to Prelude for licensing the track in the first place, putting François K in the studio to work his magic on the masters. Even as this tune perfectly captures the essence of peak-era disco, you can nevertheless hear the implied presence of the 80s waiting in the wings.

  6. Kurtis Blow The Breaks (Merucry)

    7. How come these early rap tracks all of a sudden sound fresh as a daisy? Twenty years ago this would have seemed like ancient history, quaint even, but in light of everything we've discovered in light of the 21st century disco/post punk resurgence it sounds utterly of-the-moment. See also the Jason Nevins remix of Run-DMC's It's Like That, which now sounds hopelessly dated while the OG sounds as timeless as the Nuggets box set. The Breaks glides along on a nimble funk groove, with rolling percussion, juke-joint piano and Kurtis Blow's off the cuff delivery all coming together to conjure up the moody, half-lit atmosphere of Martin Scorcese's After Hours.

  7. Bruce Johnston Pipeline (Columbia)

    8. Erstwhile-Beach Boy-drummer-on-holiday gets in on some tasty solo dancefloor action, taking his place behind the kit to guide a string section through the cresting waves of the Pacific Ocean. A killer groove, and rawer than you might expect. Check that rude drum beat, sounding like something cooked up on an Akai! Everything goes atmospheric halfway through, when the sounds of the surf wash across the breakdown like high tide on the sea of flesh.

    Incidentally, I've often thought that The Beach Boys conjured up a convincing proto-disco sound on their Sunflower LP, what with all those sun-glazed sounds and burnished edges. Lee Perry too, which is probably why - as great as Pet Sounds is - it remains my go to Beach Boys record.

  8. Odyssey Inside Out (RCA Victor)

    9. In the popular imagination, disco was supposed to have died on July 12, 1979 at Comiskey Park's Disco Demolition Night. Of course, history's rarely quite that simple. Rather than some behemoth slayed in one stroke by arena rock, disco was more like the virus that mutated to turn up again nearly everywhere - from ABC and Duran Duran's new wave to the electro boogie of The Gap Band and Mtume to Madonna and Michael Jackson's chartbusting pop to the gulf stream sounds cooked up at Compass Point and played out at the Paradise Garage, the pandemic seemingly spread all over - outliving the dinosaurs and ultimately defining modern music via the sounds of house, electro, hip hop and techno.

    Of course, in the Big Apple plenty of groups kept on grooving and the dancers kept on dancing to straight up disco. In truth, some of my favorite disco records actually come from well after its supposed expiration date. Take for instance Odyssey's Inside Out, an low-slung slab of passionate modern soul riding a down and dirty gutbucket groove. Should I be embarrassed that I first knew it as a Electribe 101 song? I suspect that I should, but I don't feel it. I'd even go so far as to say that Billie Ray Martin managed to top the original, if by only a whisker.

  9. Montana Sextet Who Needs Enemies (With A Friend Like You) (Philly Sound Works)

    10. Salsoul Orchestra mastermind Vince Montana (who also spent time in Philadelphia International's MFSB) in full swing during roughly the same era with a slab of minimal, slap-bass propelled 4/4 magic in which his vibes take center stage. I once awoke from a dream with this tune still ringing in my ears, and as I gradually worked out where it came from - sometimes you can't quite recall the specifics of these things right away - it hung over the morning like a mist.

  10. Eddy Grant Walking On Sunshine (ICE)

    11. I've always loved the way figures like Eddy Grant, Grace Jones and Billy Ocean brought the idiosyncrasies of their island life to the gulf stream flavor to their music. Indeed, to this day they form a loose triumvirate in my mind. What is Compass Point if not the culmination of this notion, with these three toiling away in the seventies only to become bonafide stars in the decade to follow. Eddy Grant later provided the theme song to the blockbuster film Romancing The Stone, while Billy Ocean did the same for its sequel (Jewel Of The Nile). And of course Grace Jones managed to become a bond girl and trade scenes with Arnold Schwarzenegger in Conan The Destroyer!

    In light of his high profile, I'm particularly fascinated with Eddy Grant's ICE imprint, formed as he built his solo career from the ground up, he nevertheless stuck with it after hitting the big time with Electric Avenue. Of course he'd already made his mark on dance culture some time before, with this tune and Living On The Frontline being staples at the Paradise Garage (see also Time Warp by The Coach House Rhythm Section). Walking On Sunshine is a brilliantly rewired electro-disco jam dominated by top-heavy afrobeat horns and Grant's loosely-delivered falsetto. The song was later covered by Rockers Revenge, yet not by Katrina And The Waves, who's song of the same title is completely different!

  11. Billy Ocean Stay The Night (GTO)

    12. Early Billy Ocean in this whiplash proto-boogie tune from his sophomore set (City Limit), which is propelled by a uniquely raw-edged drum beat that really snaps the track across the tiles of the dancefloor. Like Eddy Grant, Ocean would later top the charts in the mid-eighties with yacht staple Caribbean Queen.

  12. Ian Dury Spasticus (Autisticus) (Polydor)

    13. The great Ian Dury in Nassau, on leave from The Blockheads and getting in on that Compass Point action. Very much of a piece with the surrounding records here, this was also a staple in Larry Levan's record bag over at the Paradise Garage. Dig this little interview1 with old Ian (who in his youth suffered from polio), talking about the story behind the song.

  13. Grace Jones Pull Up To The Bumper (Island)

    14. Yet more peak-period Compass Point (perhaps the peak, in this case) with Miss Grace Jones in the driver seat. The video2 is excellent too (Neuromancer vibes in full effect). In case you haven't noticed, I'm a huge fan of the whole Compass Point phenomenon. At the moment, I have a feature in the works, which I'm planning to post here sometime around the release of the Parallax Pier sequel in June.

  14. Delegation You And I (Ariola)

    15. Lush masterpiece of bedroom disco from the premiere British soul group. I've heard tell that this isn't even their greatest record, but it's the only one I own. You And I perfectly captures the tipping point between the string-laden groove of peak-era disco and the nascent machine boogie coming just around the bend. Check those aqueous, immersive synths straight out of the deep house playbook. Sublime, in a word, and a gorgeous tune.

  15. The Whispers And The Beat Goes On (Solar)

    16. Chartbusting disco, with a two note organ vamp that stands as one of the great tossed-off hooks of all time. Later propellelling Will Smith's Miami into the charts, it also kicked off Jason Forrest's The Unrelenting Songs Of The 1979 Post Disco Crash record. Of course, none of that can touch the original. The L.A.-based Solar Records would later come to define the eighties electro boogie sound with artists like Shalamar, The Deele and Midnight Star.

  16. My Mine Hypnotic Tango (Progress Record)

    17. Italo disco. Like early Depeche Mode, this is bubblegum synth music with an even greater affinity for the dancefloor. That moody synth sequence was later sampled by both Bandulu and Carl Craig, for Thunderground's Amaranth and 69's Rushed, respectively, which is how I found out about this track in the first place. Sporting a peerless play of dynamics between the moody verses and joyous candy-coated refrain, Hypnotic Tango itself is a computer love masterpiece.

  17. Giorgio Moroder Palm Springs Drive (Polydor)

    18. From Moroder's third score, after Midnight Express and Foxes, for the film American Gigolo. This is probably my favorite of his OSTs. Everyone knows Blondie's Call Me, but this album also boasts the sleek motor-disco of Night Drive and The Apartment's moody paranoia (the latter even sounding like the lost score to The Parallax View). Palm Springs Drive - featured here - is my absolute favorite moment from the soundtrack, fusing Moroder's trademark motor-disco sound with an epic chord progression straight out of the Ennio Morricone playbook.

  18. Ashford & Simpson One More Try (Warner Bros.)

    19. Gloriously lush disco from the dynamic husband and wife songwriting duo of Nickolas Ashford and Valerie Simpson,. Penning some of the great soul songs of the era for other artists, including Ain't No Mountain High Enough, I'm Every Woman and You're All I Need To Get By, they also managed to put out twelve solid albums between the years 1973 and 1984. One More Try - from their third - finds the duo confidently entering the disco arena with a desperate plea for a second chance gliding over tricky dance rhythms, soaring ARP strings and some of the finest guitar soloing to ever grace a disco record.

  19. D-Train You're The One For Me (Prelude)

    20. The D-Train project was collaboration between James "D-Train" Williams and Hubert Eaves (previously responsible for the Esoteric Funk LP and later to play on some records with Mtume). Appropriately, this record lays down the blueprint for eighties electro boogie, with the zig-zagging synths that would come to define the decade's machine funk sound (see also Jam & Lewis), and took its rightful place as an immortal dancefloor classic. Even Liam Howlett couldn't help sampling its synth-squiggle magic for The Prodigy's Girls.

  20. Forrrce Keep On Dubbin' (With No Commercial Interruptions) (West End)

    21. The quintessential dubdisco record, featuring François Kevorkian yet again reworking an original track to a higher plane altogether. West End had a phenomenal run as the 70s gave way to the 80s, putting out loads of great records hovering on the interzone between disco and dub. In fact, this is as close to the Black Ark as disco would ever get. You can practically imagine Lee "Scratch" Perry's trademark ad-libs over the top. Underground disco par excellence.

  21. GQ Disco Nights (Rock Freak) (Arista)

    22. Conversely, this is disco from high street, crashing the charts and the airwaves alike. Studio 54 music. I first heard this on Magic 92.5, way back in it's early years when it was on fire with live DJs and a killer selection of soul/disco/funk/boogie the order of the day. I remember driving home from the Clairemont Library one day, crossing the bridge from Mission Bay onto Friars Rd., when suddenly Disco Nights comes on the radio. I'd already become unknowingly aware of pieces of it - looped by Chicago's Stacy Kidd in a house cut that had come out recently - and the rush of recognition upon hearing the original for the first time hit like a ton of bricks.

    That was one of the great things about branching out from beats, hearing all those records that had fueled the music I grew up with for the first time (and still at such a young age!. The realization that there was this vast continuum stretching back to figures like Curtis Mayfield, Miles Davis and James Brown, rather than everything being these solitary islands of sound, well it was quite a trip. All of this must sound so boring to someone coming in the era of Youtube, where all that information lay at one's fingertips! Well, back in the day, it was a big deal, trust me. And I wouldn't trade it for the world.

  22. Love Committee Just As Long As I Got You (Disco Re-Edit by Dimitri From Paris) (BBE)

    23. If there's a pre-disco sound that was disco's most logical precursor, then it's surely Philly soul. Groups like The Three Degrees, The Intruders and MFSB were dealing in proto-disco way back in '73 with tunes like Dirty Old Man, I'll Always Love My Mama and TSOP, and they all wound up dovetailing naturally into the scene once it was in full force. As if that weren't enough, full-fledged disco groups like Double Exposure, The Trammps and Love Committee all hailed from Philadelphia, starting out under different names earlier in the decade as pure Philly soul. Double Exposure's Ten Percent and Love Committee's Law And Order are both great examples of good LPs in this vein.

    This is Dimitri From Paris' exclusive edit from his (excellent) Disco Forever mix. I remember picking this up in San Juan way back when. My cousin balked at the sleeve (I can't believe you're buying that!). This remix is brilliant, opening up the locked-down original to aircraft-hangar size. Transforming those baritone backing vocals into the lead, echoing lonely from within with that same sense of isolation as Bernard Sumner on the early New Order records. Chopping the horn fanfare into a looped refrain that builds and builds the tension to the breaking point before releasing in a single strummed guitar. Exquisite stuff.

  23. Kano I'm Ready (Emergency)

    24. Good old Kano. Kano were great. They must have the highest volume of classics out of all the italo disco groups (shoot me down, I'm no expert on the stuff). Rather than a Moroder-derived machine pulse, I'm Ready is driven by loose-limbed live drumming (as is its b-side, Holly Dolly, famously the template for the proto-Detroit techno of A Number Of Names' Sharevari). The production on this record is just perfect, it's rubberband rhythm underpins gently trilling synths, vocoders and those delicate lead vocals.

  24. Kebekelektrik War Dance (Les Disques Direction)

    25. This the original version, rather than the Tom Moulton mix. I go back and forth on which one I like more, each of which have their undoubted merits. Moulton's version grooves better, but this really places the synths front-and-center. Part of me thinks I made the wrong decision... like I said, it's a coin toss! This is Moroder-esque motor-disco of the highest caliber, always making me picture some motorcade/caravan cutting through the desert under the blazing sun, synth-lines melting in the heat.

  25. Donna Summer I Feel Love (Casablanca)

    26. The godfather of motor-disco disco tracks, produced by Giorgio Moroder for the prototypical disco diva, Donna Summer. Remember a few years back when everyone was calling themselves a diva? That was pretty silly. Donna Summer is the real deal. When I first heard this track, I assumed it was a recent remix and not the original version from 1977! Despite the utterly brilliant chrome-plated futurism in evidence throughout, Summer still manages to outshine everything else with soaring vocals eight miles high and rising.

  26. Bettye LaVette Doin' The Best That I Can (A Special New Mix by Walter Gibbons) (West End)

    27. Going out with a bang! More West End, this time with Bettye LaVette at the wheel of a steadfast galleon constructed by none other than disco super-producer Walter Gibbons. It's impossible not to be moved by this beautifully rendered tale of getting over somebody one day at a time.
    At the track's midpoint, when that plaintive organ line erupts out of nowhere, well if you're anything like me you're in disbelief. You've never heard anything like this before! Then, the strings cut back in - horns bobbing and weaving over that groove - and the whole thing goes triumphant, proto-acid lines tearing across the soundscape like it's the most natural thing in the world, before the organ returns and a sublime piano line drives the tune to it's natural conclusion. Every element woven into a disco symphony. She's herself again now. I Will Survive, indeed. An impeccable example of the magic that can be wrought from a 12" slab of plastic, and a perfect ending to our disco odyssey. Hope you enjoyed it!

Footnotes

1. Ian Dury interview (check it out @ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSo9OErEmM4).
2. Grace Jones Pull Up To The Bumper music video (check it out @ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tc1IphRx1pk).
Mixed By: Flynn & DJ Slye.
Special Edits: Do'shonne & Slye.
Samples: Fifty Foot Hose Opus 11, The Beach Boys Let's Go Away For Awhile, James Woods in Against All Odds, Nastassja Kinski in Paris Texas.
Vibes: Gil Scott-Heron & Brian Jackson, FSOL ISDN, Sudden Impact, Moodymann, assorted El Cajon dive bars and nightclubs, Disco Godfather, David Bowie's Station To Station, Patrick Cowley, Jefferson Airplane, Atari 2600 and those endless exquisite gradient skies, ARP Solina String, Palm Desert, Jedi Knights, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Club Stratus, Summer Of Sam, The Mizell Brothers, Arthur Russell, Bobby Konders, swimming in A.G., Morgan Geist's Moves, Hohner Clavinet, Herbie Hancock, Eddie Russ, Battle For The Planet Of The Apes, Jack Kirby, Paul's Boutique, Lakeside discotheques, Lil' Louis & The World, Beck Hansen, Harlem River Drive, Night Moves, Scott Weiland, Wild Style, Terranova, The Parallax View, Innerzone Orchestra, Spoonie Gee, Radio Mettrex, Steely Dan, Fender Rhodes, The Op-art Hall Of Fame, Calypsoul 70, Opinionated Diner, Kirk DeGiorgio, Sly Stone, Sam Mangwana, The Isley Brothers, Glenn Underground, BBE, Parliament/Funkadelic, Ubiquity, Gram Parsons, The Honey Bee Hive, G-Street, East Village, Warren Zevon's Night Time In The Switching Yard, and of course Woebot.
...
Disco is dead.
Long live disco.

Garden Grooves 003

Posted on April 4, 2018 @ 11:42pm by Coqui

With Spring beginning to take flight, it was high time for the crew to get involved in some horticultural escapades at the Parallax Gardens. Consequently, here is the third edition of Garden Grooves (aka the music we played). Spanning a casual week of afternoon work, here's the selection as it played out:

Toyan - How The West Was Won

(Greensleeves: 1981)

Kicking off the whole affair was this bass-heavy deejay record, Toyan's proto-dancehall tour de force. What sleeves these records have! Ranking Toyan does his thing over crisp, dubtastic riddims laid by the Roots Radics and mixed by Scientist. A Henry "Junjo" Lawes production.

Grace Jones - Living My Life

(Island: 1982)

My second favorite Grace Jones LP by a country mile. Unlike my #1 pick (Nightclubbing) it's comprised almost completely of Grace-penned originals (the one exception is Melvin Van Peebles' The Apple Stretching). Boasting killer tune after killer tune - My Jamaican Guy, Nipple To The Bottle) and the descending neuromantic boogie of Unlimited Capacity For Love (choice) - Living My Life rounds out Miss Jones' Island trilogy with aplomb.

Jah Wobble And The Invaders Of The Heart - Invaders Of The Heart

(Lago: 1983)

Discovered this record only recently over the course of formulating the whole Terminal Vibration. This rounds out another trilogy alongside Full Circle and the Snake Charmer mini-LP, featuring Wobble in collaborative mode (this time with The Invaders Of The Heart, who he'd hit full stride with in the 90s). Hauntingly exotic post punk/post-disco moves inna My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts stylee.

IndianOcean - School Bell/Treehouse

(Sleeping Bag: 1986)

Arthur Russell's abstract disco freakout, knocked out with rolling percussion and seemingly improvised vocals. You hear these Arthur Russell records and they really opens up the whole idea of 80s music, straining at the confines of the predictable collective memory of the era to inhabit similar climes to Hindustani music, cosmic jazz and krautrock. Much like King Sunny Adé's Ma Jaiye Oni, my favorite part is when the keyboards take the reins about 2/3 of the way through.

Tom Tom Club - The Man With The 4-Way Hips

(Island: 1983)

Sumptuously three-dimensional new wave disco from the Tom Toms' second album Close To The Bone, the 12" gives the groove room to breath with those sublimely detailed synths and tactile percussion. The flipside's dub version is a real treat, and like Wally Badarou's Chief Inspector plays like a proto-house instrumental (once again, those synths!). Clearly, there was something in the water down at Compass Point.

Maximum Joy - Station M.X.J.Y.

(Y: 1982)

Shiny post punk funk on the Y imprint and featuring prior members of the Pop Group and the Glaxo Babies. I always want to give this, along with The Slits' Cut and Come Away With ESG to every 15 year old I know. Coming on like a left-footed, untamed English Beat circa Special Beat Service, its brilliant skanking rhythms square the circle between new pop and punk funk better than anyone else. Shame that it isn't more easily available...

...and with the closing bars of All Wrapped Up!, we put away the tools and kicked back for the evening. The following day found the clouds rolling in, and the overcast skies had a decided impact on the playlist as it unfolded...

Liquid Liquid - Optimo

(99: 1983)

New York crew get down and dirty with storied 4-track EP, wringing magic from the whole affair only to get ripped off by Grandmaster ź Melle Mel's White Lines (Don't Don't Do It). As much as I love White Lines, the original loping groove in Cavern is where its at. Plus, you've got Optimo's Central Park conga jam and the rolling clockwork downbeat groove of the post rock-predictive Out. A true gem of a record. And non-stop props to Señor Lavelle for putting out the Liquid Liquid comp on Mo Wax back in the mid-nineties.

Ian Dury & The Blockheads - Do It Yourself

(Stiff: 1979)

Sophomore full-length outing from old Ian and co., this is often classed as a disappointment but have you heard it lately? Sounds to me like a worthwhile follow up to New Boots And Panties!! and the slew of ace 7"s The Blockheads spat out over the course of the late seventies, with a heavy emphasis on post-disco rhythms, a couple quasi-reggae tunes and even shades of Lodger. Something like Sink My Boats is utterly original, definitively seventies - like watching six hours of The Rockford Files and then falling asleep to a fever dream where Peter Wyngarde wanders into The Last Of Sheila - and somehow manages to sound unlike anything else around.

Various Artists - Babylon: The Original Soundtrack

(Island: 1980)

Rock hard reggae soundtrack from the 1980 film starring Aswad's Brinsley Ford. Scored by the great Dennis Bovell, it also features Aswad's Warrior Charge (a Parallax staple). Great cloudy day reggae (see also Horace Andy's Dance Hall Style) this was the perfect way to wrap up the second day, with darkness settling in on the Eastern horizon.

Forrrce - Keep On Dancin'

(West End: 1982)

Forrrce's slap-bass odyssey kicked off the third day, the proto-raps unfolding over dubdisco production as we cleared our way into the herb garden and the various banana groves scattered about the premises. The awesome Keep On Dubbin' (With No Commercial Interruptions) takes matters even deeper into leftfield with François Kevorkian dub-inflected hall of mirrors approach in full swing. At this point, the sun was hanging heavy in the sky and the 4/4 pulse was in full effect.

Lino Squares - The Role Of Linoleum

(Humboldt County: 1997)

Moody minimalism from Andrew Weatherall and Keith Tenniswood on temporary holiday from their Two Lone Swordsmen project, at this point gaining full steam. Neuphrique is like a dress rehearsal for No Red Stopping and is very much in the 2LS deep house vein. A quintessential '97 record, you could take this, Moodymann's Silentintroduction and Primal Scream's Echo Dek and have a decent thumbnail sketch of where I was at the time. Blue Pole Dancer always reminds me of 44's Groove Station, even if it came out a couple years earlier.

William Onyeabor - Anything You Sow

(Wilfilms: 1985)

Sparkling guttertronics from Nigerian synth wizard William Onyeabor (his final record in fact). This is very much in the chipper bubblegum Kraftwerk vein of Speak & Spell (or latterly Hot Chip's latest record), but shot through with a distinct highlife flavor. I picked this up seven years ago (at Amoeba in San Francisco) on my honeymoon.

His records were extremely hard to come by at the time, and I absolutely adored Onyeabor's Better Change Your Mind (as featured on the Nigeria '70 compilation) and the Body And Soul 12" with the Scientist remix (which I did have). I couldn't believe my luck at finding this ace reissue and upon returning home and dropping it on the turntable instantly fell in love with the sounds contain therein. Fast-forward a few years and Luaka Bop releases the lavish Onyeabor box set (containing his entire discography), and the world rejoiced.

Hot Chip - Why Make Sense?

(Domino: 2015)

As if to drive the point home, here's that latest Hot Chip LP. I quite like this sound they've arrived at, perched midway between Cowley/Moroder synth-disco pulse and twinkling bubblegum electropop. There's even room for the odd surprise, like White Wine And Fried Chicken's slow-motion country ballad. Good stuff.

Patrick Cowley - Menergy: The Album

(Fusion: 1981)

The conventional wisdom on Patrick Cowley seems to have always been that his album ventures like Megatron Man and Mind warp were disappointing and that his productions (Sylvester's Your Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)) and remixes (Cowley's psychedelic Mega Mix of Donna Summer's I Feel Love) were where it's at.

Well, sure it's hard to top those highs, but I quite enjoy these full-length electro-disco excursions (think Cerrone and Moroder). What with the recent reissues of his cosmic synth music (School Daze and Muscle Up) and abstract post punk (Catholic), he seems almost like a West Cost, mechanoid Arthur Russell.

Andrew Weatherall - Qualia

(Höga Nord: 2017)

Last year's Weatherall solo shot plys a sort of instrumental electro-inflected krautrock. This very much reminds me of Death In Vegas' Satan's Circus, in that it plows a similar furrow with live drumming and spiral sequences that conjure up a sound that strikes me as ever familiar and yet I'm unable to place it. Mr. Weatherall's been on a roll this decade, with four solo LPs, The Asphodells' cosmic disco extravaganza and The Woodleigh Research Facility record, all of which I've enjoyed immensely.

Holger Czukay - On The Way To The Peak Of Normal

(Welt-Rekord: 1981)

With the sun setting and parties split off to procure dinner from The Tako Factory, Czukay's hauting solo endeavor seemed a natural choice. Ode To Perfume is quite simply a masterpiece, eighteen minutes of low-slung imaginary soundtrack music that rides a loping rhythm as guitars tears into the mix sounding like some distant cousin of Can's Deadlock. Czukay even works in his beloved French horn.

Can - Saw Delight

(Harvest: 1977)

Back in the mix with late-period Can - we're pulling Winter weeds, turning the Northside lawn into a putting green - whose liquid rhythms pour over the morning dew-covered grass and out into the palms. For me, this record is in the upper echelon with Ege Bamyasi and Future Days, it finds the band spooling out that Moonshake sound across an entire record. If I've said it before, I've said it a hundred times: if this were by some new band called Jar or Receptacle, and not coming in after Monster Movie and Tago Mago, we'd all mention it in the same breath as the Talking Heads' Remain In Light and the Meat Puppets' Up On The Sun. Exquisite.

J.J. Cale - 5

(Shelter: 1979)

Mr. Cale's music is one of the great understated treasures to spring from the 1970s. This the fifth of his LPs from the decade, and you'll want all of them. His rhythm box is still fading in and out of the mix - perfectly integrated with the live instrumentation, like in a Moodymann record - with some tasteful synth licks creeping in here for good measure. Like the four records to come before, the production is otherworldly, exquisite. Alongside Randy Newman and Harry Nilsson, one of the great songwriters of the era.

Prince Far I - Under Heavy Manners

(Joe Gibbs: 1977)

Prince Far I's classic platter found us back on the Southeast Terrace to work some landscaping magic. This is one of the deejay records (alongside things like Dr. Alimantado's Best Dressed Chicken In Town and Dillinger's CB 200), with Prince Far I's stentorian delivery front and center over peak-period Joe Gibbs backing. A stone cold classic, this record.

Incidentally, I got turned onto Prince Far I via the instrumental Cry Tuff Dub Encounter Chapter 1 dub outing (mixed by Adrian Sherwood), owing to Long Life's featuring in a Rockers Hi-Fi mix.

Various Artists - Calypsoul 70: Caribbean Soul & Calypso Crossover 1969-1979

(Strut: 2008)

This compilation of (put crudely) Caribbean funk and disco is an unmissable romp, put out by compilation heavyweights Strut. Highlights include Amral's Trinidad Cavaliers Steel Orchestra's instrumental version of Gwen Guthrie's 90% Of Me Is You and Cedric Im Brooks' Blackness Of Darkness. There's even a cover of Barrabas' Woman!

Some tracks veer quite close to afrobeat territory, nevertheless I suspect that this contains the germ of the Compass Point/Parallax Pier sound. It's all quite evocative to me of time spent on the island back in the day, especially the way influences will run to and fro between the islands and the mainland. It's all very cosmopolitan in a casual way. Upon reflection, I suspect that some of these sounds were still hanging around when I first visited Puerto Rico, such is their familiarity.

Sweet Talks - Hollywood Highlife Party

(Philips: 1978)

The Sweet Talks were a Ghanaian highlife band that sprung up in the mid-seventies and developed something of a profile, touring the world and ultimately winding up in L.A. and recording this little album, full of sparkling guitars and driving 4/4 rhythms. It's nearly impossible to overlook this music's compatibility with contemporary disco. I wonder if - like Manu Dibango's Soul Makossa - it made it's way onto any of the era's disco dancefloors?

The Beginning Of The End - Funky Nassau

(Alston: 1971)

Crack band from the Bahamas cut killer funk LP, on par with James Brown and Cymande. This very nearly made the Golden 200. Funky Nassau is one of those great 7" singles, and you get the whole thing right here at the record's opening. Interesting to think that this band were doing their thing in Nassau about a decade before the Compass Point All Stars coalesced into an institution.

Osibisa - Getting Hot

(Chic: 1987)

Discovered this only recently thanks to the Singles As Bs & 12 Inches box set put out by Repertoire (check out the excellent Roger Dean sleeve). I have the Black Ant and a handful of their LPs, so this anthology filled out the gaps quite nicely. I had no idea about the band's 80s output, and this record clearly stood out as something special and I tracked a copy down accordingly.

Featuring BIG production, like ABC's How To Be A Zillionaire! (in fact, that very well could have been the next record played - if this hadn't been the last), it could slot right into a contemporary soundtrack during some montage scene. It's all about the Bush-Fire-Mix. I was momentarily certain that the getting hot, getting hot chorus showed up in Ice Cube's No Vaseline, but it was just a (sample) mirage.

Appropriately, this provided the grand finale as we wrapped up work on the Parallax Gardens, the assorted terraces and groves now properly prepared for summer just around the bend.


Under the palms.

Terminal Vibration IV (Rockers Revenge)

Posted on February 6, 2018 @ 11:29pm by Coqui

So you've absorbed those death disco tapes already, and I'm back with an armful of records. Let's head over to Raven's place up there on the corner and give a few of these a spin. I've got some of the heaviest fourth world voodoo punk funk here - about half the records in the crate - brought to you by the three major dynasties of post punk coming out of London, New York and Bristol, but today we're gonna start with the heady interzone between last episode's new wave boogie and the voodoo slates to come: I'm talking about the Spartan minimalistic funk turned out by crews hailing from places like Manchester, Leeds and (especially) New York.

Interestingly, nearly all of these groups would wind up shearing into a sort of new wave boogie as the decade progressed, while others wound up providing crucial building blocks for hip hop, downbeat and even house. Yet there's one band who emerged just a little bit later, a band whose sound sprang from these same tangled corridors but then managed to spread out across the radio waves and set the charts ablaze, conquering the world in the process. I'm talking now about a band that everybody knows... a little band from L.A.

I'm talking about The Red Hot Chili Peppers.

The Red Hot Chili Peppers were everywhere in the nineties, maintaining a strong presence right up to the present day, even making their way into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame in 2012. However, before breaking out as megastars in 1991 with Blood Sugar Sex Magik, they managed to put out four solid records between the years 1984 and 1989 that elaborated on the punk funk template and imbued it with a healthy dose of California sun. These records all have a chunky, spacious sound, sporting booming drums, chiming guitars and Flea's trademark slap-bass all mixed down with a crisp, vibrant production very much of a piece with everything discussed here today.1

Surprisingly, I've found that many fans of the band's later material seem to turn their nose up at the early stuff, the Hillel Slovak2 era. What gives?! Tunes like the pile-driving Jungleman (from the George Clinton-produced Freaky Styley), True Men Don't Kill Coyotes, Taste The Pain and Hollywood (Africa) (their take on The Meters' immortal New Orleans funk jam Africa) are unmissable romps across the Venice Beach pier, filled with youthful exuberance and rude spirit. Behind The Sun even takes things into Parallax Pier territory, with chiming guitars and a sing-song chorus that brings to mind the Tom Tom Club's sessions at Compass Point!

At this point, the Chili Peppers would often turn to covers of rock and soul staples like Jimi Hendrix's Fire, Sly & The Family Stone's If You Want Me To Stay, Bob Dylan's Subterranean Homesick Blues and Stevie Wonder's Higher Ground (which I'd argue tops the original - blasphemous, I know... but so true!). The fascinating thing about the Hendrix and Dylan covers in particular is the way they highlight early examples of - for all intents and purposes - rapping, as if the band were reaching back and paying homage to the roots of Anthony Kiedis' trademark rapid-fire delivery. It's also interesting to note the band's unexpected avant garde pedigree (for all the hipster haters out there): original drummer Cliff Martinez3 had previously drummed for a latter day incarnation of Captain Beefheart's Magic Band, while Gang Of Four's punk funk godfather Andy Gill was drafted to produce their self-titled debut.

Gang Of Four, hailing from Leeds, were the prototypical minimalist post punk band. Indeed, one could almost have them down as a punk funk counterpart to Wire. They pared all elements deemed unnecessary from their music, leaving a sparse, wiry sound that moved like clockwork mechanisms travelling across a grid at strict right angles. Emerging on Bob Last's Fast Product imprint - incidentally where The Human League started out as well - the band released their debut EP, Damaged Goods. The title track, Armalite Rifle and Love Like Anthrax brilliantly fleshed out the different corners of the band's stark modernist sound and they were accordingly signed by major label EMI for their debut LP. Entertainment is one of those quintessential post punk records,4 housing fierce, taut missives like Not Great Men, Ether and At Home He's A Tourist that have gone down as indelible post punk classics. The band famously aimed for a dry, spartan sound - free of rock's wild abandon and detached from its roots in the blues - and it's a sound they achieve to the fullest here.

However, one of my favorite moments from the band is their 1979 non-LP b-side It's Her Factory, where they make room for a bit of reverb - bathing the lead melodica in an eerie glow - giving the whole thing a sense of relatively spacious atmosphere. Solid Gold, the group's sophomore record, accordingly seemed to follow suit, allowing a little air into the production across the space of the album. The songs themselves may not have been quite as incendiary as those on the diamond-hard debut, but tunes like He'd Send In The Army and A Hole In The Wallet are emblematic of the record's focus on tricky, twisted rhythms and an increasing focus on atmosphere and dynamics. Meanwhile, the desolate Paralysed dragged the tempos down to a staggering crawl.

It's certainly an interesting step toward the band's later period, where they morphed into a strange punk/boogie proposition that seems to be endlessly maligned by the cognoscenti but I nevertheless find oddly fascinating. 1982's Songs Of The Free is a deeply unusual LP that veers between Heaven 17-esque new pop like I Love A Man In Uniform and the atmospheric downbeat reverie of closer Of The Instant. We Live As We Dream, Alone, which comes on like a booming dub version of one of the band's earlier punk funk excursions, just might be the best thing here. The record quite simply makes a virtue of simply sounding like nothing else around. When you factor in the remaining tracks and the album's evocative sleeve... well, it's a cool little record.

Unfortunately, the band's next album, Hard, was anything but. As such, it's even more maligned by just about everyone. And yet. And yet... there is a fair bit of solid new wave boogie to be found here, for those inclined. The opening Is It Love - which was the album's big single, even getting a 12" Extended Dance Mix - is a lush new pop number that may be a million miles away from Damaged Goods but is nonetheless an excellent slice of silky smooth dance pop. Elsewhere, the atmospheric Woman Town wouldn't sound out of place on the second side of Songs Of The Free.5 Not that I'm making a case for the album as some sort of lost classic, you understand! But it certainly has its moments. Hard turned out to be the final album of the band's original run, capping off a discography that, when taken as a whole, offers us an intriguing glimpse at the way a bunch of punks might ultimately wander from the pit into the disco, turning up some unique sounds along the way.

Another group who made a similar transition were A Certain Ratio. Yes, A Certain Ratio! They seem to perennially suffer the fate of being damned with faint praise - often getting lost in the Factory shuffle - but they get my vote over Gang Of Four any day.6 These guys are the perennial underdogs in the post punk sweepstakes. They may have never got around to making that stone cold front-to-back classic record, but their discography offers up a wealth of the greatest punk funk you could ask for. The Early anthology put out by Soul Jazz made this point brilliantly. Take a song like Flight. This is one of the top five or so tunes in this continuum. Utterly unique, Woebot nailed it when he noted the song's gigantic ethereal sound like a yet more liquid Can. Word.

Infamously, the band were recording their debut album in Newark, New Jersey when the working mixdown was inadvertently wiped by the engineer while the band were out celebrating the final day of recording! On returning to Manchester, the band were miserably forced to work up their debut album by polishing demo takes with producer Martin Hannett. Already feeling quite defeated, they were then slated to back Grace Jones on a song called Again before the project fizzled out unceremoniously.7 The breaks just wouldn't come! Despite the band's seemingly endless plague of bad luck, they managed to turn out a whole raft of first rate material like Do The Du, Shack Up and The Fox, all of which were prototypical post punk of the highest caliber.

From there, the band continued to change with the times and edged ever closer into new pop/jazzdance territory. Sextet and the Knife Slits Water - with the
Kether Hot Knives (Mix In Special) version on the flip - is the grooviest, tightest post punk record you could ask for and the avant cousin to the whole bedroom funk concept I'm forever hinting at (there's a feature in there somewhere, believe me). The sound leans ever-so-slightly into early Level 42 territory (nothing wrong with that), but maintaining traces of the spooky unhinged voodoo of their earliest recordings in those chanted vocals and the spaces between the spaces. Chanted vocals in this style are the prime signifier of mid-period punk funk, evoking mysterious corridors within the groove that one might get pulled into at any moment.

I'd Like To See You Again veers further yet toward a certain sleekness, even if a tune like Saturn is of a piece with the band's earlier material (in spirit at least). Elsewhere, Hot Knights is a vocal adaptation of the Kether Hot Knives version of Knife Slits Water. Still, the heart of the record lies in tunes like Touch and Axis which are very Jamaica, Queens jazz/funk/boogie, and before you know it (1984) you've got a record like Life's A Scream, killer dance pop on the order of INXS or - once again - Level 42 that takes you into the glitz of the era's overground nightclubs. Moonwalking in neon. With those triggered oof, oof vocals - straight out of the electro playbook - A Certain Ratio have wandered into the disco even more convincingly than Gang Of Four managed around the same time.

However, if there were one band that could boogie with the best of them, it was surely Ian Dury & The Blockheads. Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick has that cruising city streets at night groovy thang going... in fact, the backing track could practically fit right in there on Off The Wall (with the chorus sounding not unlike Jermaine Jackson's Erucu)! Only Ian's conversational Midlands lead vocals - think Mike Skinner in The Streets - and Davey Payne's wild sax solo give this away as something other, conjuring up images of The Blockheads grooving immaculate on some cramped, smoke-bathed stage in a ramshackle seaside pub out in Essex.

Debut album New Boots And Panties!! is an absolute treasure, with the nimble bedroom funk of Wake Up And Make Love With Me setting things off on a drifting mirage of rhythm before following up with more skewed boogie in the shape of If I Was With A Woman and I'm Partial To Your Abracadabra (there are even a few undisclosed moments of straight up punk tacked onto the end to boot!). The key to The Blockheads' seemingly natural grasp of funk dynamics - this in 1977, a full year before even Adolescent Sex - must surely be their jazz chops. Indeed, I have a Steely Dan documentary on the making of Aja that features Ian Dury as a frequent commentator, and one could almost read the band's sound as an outgrowth of the band's dancefloor sides like Peg and The Fez. Perhaps not totally accurate, but an interesting thought nonetheless.

Of course Ian Dury ended up writing himself into the Compass Point story a few years later with Lord Upminster, which was recorded in Nassau with Sly & Robbie and features the excellent Paradise Garage staple Spasticus (Autisticus). Like Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick, it hinges on the axis of silky smooth verse juxtaposed against abrasive chorus, revelling in Dury's clever wordplay. While I could dive further into the Compass Point All Stars at this point, along with figures like Grace Jones and Lizzy Mercier Descloux, in truth they will all warrant their own chapter in the Terminal Vibration saga (forthcoming in a month or so) and ultimately a full feature in their own right (as Summer arrives, most likely). So with whispers of the Paradise Garage still hanging in the air, let's take a left turn into the streets of New York.

The Big Apple was rather appropriately a hotbed of punk funk activity, starting with No Wave bands like DNA, Teenage Jesus And The Jerks and especially James Chance & The Contortions crawling out of the sewer at the tail end of the decade. James Chance came on like a skronky, more punk Blockheads (or Richard Hell & The Voidoids gone funk) with records like Buy and Off White (released as James White & The Blacks). The production was sparse and the rhythms stripped to their bare bones, like James Brown circa The Payback shot through with atonal, abrasive punk spirit.

However, it's the slightly later N.Y. material that concerns us today, permeated as it is with atmosphere. A particularily good example of this transition would be Black Box Disco (from the Vortex OST), featuring Lydia Lunch of Teenage Jesus And The Jerks, which is the most sure-footed nimble punk funk imaginable, cooked up by the Vortex house band as film dialogue - of what sounds like a torture scene - floats over the top. It's terrifically magical track that works on most dancefloors in a way that the earlier No New York bands would not.8 The remainder of the soundtrack is quite atmospheric, with almost no beats at all (the one exception being The Chase, which is the cousin of mid-period A Certain Ratio).

While we're getting into punk funk at its most dexterous, mention must be made of Joseph Bowie's Defunkt. As mentioned before, this crew were the prime influence on The Red Hot Chili Peppers and you can certainly hear it, especially in Joseph Bowie's vocals... the only thing lacking is that Slovak/Frusciante guitar crunch. Tunes like Illusion (from 1982's Thermonuclear Sweat) and Strangling Me With Your Love (from the 1980 self-titled debut) were far more stripped to the bone than nearly any straight-up funk band of the era, often recalling the classic one-the-one funk of James Brown circa Hell, while moments like Make Them Dance moved wild shapes at a brisk tempo that reach almost afrobeat levels of pitched insanity. In The Good Times (yet another riff on Chic's Good Times bassline) even highlights a certain affinity between Defunkt's no-nonsense approach and the homespun funk that the Sugar Hill and Paul Winley backing bands were working up on the early rap records around the same time.

However, if there was a New York label that was the standard bearer of Downtown dancefloor-heavy punk funk, then it was Ed Bahlman's 99 Records. With the label's striking visual aesthetic, featuring vivid, colorful, of-the-moment artwork, it seemed to capture the spirit of the times at the nexus between the post punk avant garde and the post-disco dancefloors of the era (and as such places it at the forefront of today's discussion). The material released on the label was heavy on atmosphere while maintaining a distinct pop edge, and tellingly more than a few tunes made their way onto Larry Levan's turntables at the Paradise Garage.9

Liquid Liquid were one of two bands whose releases were central to the label's discography and are probably the most widely known. Plying a heavily percussive - almost tribal - sound, their music was spacious and atmospheric, with ghostly chants fading in and out of the mist as the band churned out a loose-limbed brand of dancefloor funk. The Optimo EP, with its swirling red and yellow op-art imagery, turned out to be the group's preeminent record. The title track pummels you with a frenzy of percussion interlocking with a clockwork bass groove as scat vocals dance across its surface, while Cavern rides a loping bass groove that would ultimately get nicked by Grandmaster & Melle Mel for the epochal White Lines (Don't Don't Do It) (not to mention a more oblique interpretation in Big Audio Dynamite's The Bottom Line).

The thumb-piano stylings of Scraper recall the band's earlier self-titled EP, where tunes like Groupmegroup and New Walk churned at a more laidback tempo. The band's music - encompassed on but four EPs released in the early 80s on 99 Records - is quite simply essential listening. Famously, James Lavelle issued the first real compilation of the group's material on his Mo Wax imprint, rounding up the band's first three EPs into one essential package with an attractive mosaic sleeve that referenced the evocative 99 artwork of the original 12" records. Released in 1997, it's another example of dance music's dalliance with post punk - well before the retro gold rush of the early 21st century - that grew organically out of the scene's groove fascination in whatever form it came (there was certainly the clear cut abstract hip hop connection). And as I've said before, this is the context through which a certain 90s kid encountered most of this music in the first place.

The other big 99 band were ESG, a group centered around the Scroggins sisters who were merely teenagers when they started out. Famously, their mother had bought them all instruments so that they'd play music rather than get into trouble. I read somewhere that at the time the girls were described as The Supremes meet Public Image Ltd. I can't find the quote now, and I don't know who said it, but it isn't too far off. Their self-titled debut EP is housed in another stunning example of 99 sleeve art and plays out as the quintessential essence of the label's sound, which is in this case somewhat more bare bones than Liquid Liquid's, but somehow no less atmospheric. Moody rides a killer bassline over which the girls chant Very moody, while UFO is like the shower scene from Psycho taken out for a dance.

Interestingly, both songs were crucial building blocks in multiple genres of modern music. UFO, which was sampled by Big Daddy Kane and The Notorious B.I.G. - even showing up much later on J Dilla's Donuts - became something of a staple hip hop signifier (wasn't there a Gang Starr song that sampled it too?), while Moody formed the basis of Murk's Miami house chestnut Reach For Me (released under the name Funky Green Dogs From Outer Space). The girls even titled a later EP Sample Credits Don't Pay Our Bills!, which was released around the time of their unjustly neglected 1991 comeback record. Fortunately, they managed to soak up some love during the post punk revival with two new LPs issued in 2002 and 2006,10 Step Off and Keep On Moving respectively, which were solid records in their own right.

My favorite ESG record, however, is 1983's Come Away With ESG. It's an album-length statement, which means you get to experience the girls' sound in 3D stretched over a cozy 30 minutes. Kicking off with the bluesy tumble of Come Away staggering down some shadowy back alley, the record turns up plenty of uptempo punk funk like Dance, You Make No Sense and The Beat, in which loping bass grooves interlock with rather tactile drums as terse lyrics are chanted over the top. The rushing Chistelle even brings in an eerie guitar line - which appears to get reversed every so often, Detroit techno style - as wind/synth effects creep in and out of the mix, while About You rocks a midtempo groove with the thinnest proto-g-funk synth line imaginable. Of course, there's also the matter of Moody (Spaced Out), a dancefloor version of the original (from their debut EP) which sports a tougher groove and massive synth effects simmering throughout like the soundscapes of Yar's Revenge.

Finally, there's one last New York band I'd like to touch on, and that's the Bush Tetras. While they only put out one 7" on 99 Records (their other two records came out on Fetish), they fit the label's aesthetic perfectly. Tunes like Too Many Creeps and Snakes Crawl consist of composite drum/bass/guitar parts that all interlock into ultra-tight grooves captured with vivid clarity. Cynthia Sley's vocals often recall Kate Pierson and Cindy Wilson's spoken parts on the early B-52's records. The brisk turn in Cowboys In Africa (from the Rituals EP) comes on like The Cramps gone funky, while the dubbed out Rituals closes the record on a downbeat note with ragged rockabilly shapes that would fit right into the Repo Man soundtrack. The Things That Go Boom In The Night (the group's final record) tightens up the groove again but this time with a slightly heavier guitar attack - more distortion! - while the b-side Das Ah Riot runs a mad phased guitar part through the track in such a way that seems to tie all three of the group's records together.

Jumping back across the Atlantic for a moment, it's worth noting the Bush Tetras theoretical cousins - and Gang Of Four's sister band - the Delta 5. They debuted in 1979 with the Mind Your Own Business/Now That You're Gone, a conceptual interrogation of relationship dynamics over clockwork straight jacket funk rhythms. The band turned out a series of 7" singles that further developed their taut punk funk sound, even introducing a horn section on Colour, which ultimately culminated in the See The Whirl LP (which I haven't heard). The Singles & Sessions 1979-81 compilation, which I do have, rounds up all the group's singles and augments them with some BBC sessions for good measure.

If the Delta 5 and Gang Of Four represented punk funk at its most jittery in the UK, then the Minutemen cranked things up to a whole other amphetamine-fueled level out in L.A. The group's records are absolutely steeped in sun-baked L.A. atmosphere, in the same way that War's The World Is A Ghetto evoked heatwaves rising from the city's asphalt. In many ways they represented for the gritty underbelly of the city while the Red Hot Chili Peppers were strutting down the boardwalk... some might say that both bands represented two sides of the same coin.

Early EPs like Paranoid Time and Joy were excellent shots of pioneering hardcore, yet there was already a distinctly post punk funk flavor in tracks like More Joy and Joe McCarthy's Ghost that came on like a West Coast, more lived-in Gang Of Four. It's a muscular funk, to be sure, with turn on a dime frenetic rhythms anchored by D. Boon's combative, barked vocals.

The band were one of the mainstays of L.A. institution SST (the home of Black Flag), where they put out a whole brace of records ranging from 12" EPs like Buzz Or Howl Under The Influence Of Heat and Project Mersh to 7" shots like the "Tour Spiel" EP and albums like What Makes A Man Start Fires? and 3-Way Tie (For Last). Double Nickels On The Dime - famously released within months of that other SST post-hardcore milestone double-album Zen Arcade (by Hüsker Dü) - was a tour de force that ran the full gamut of the band's stylistic reach, with hardcore, funk, rock 'n roll, acoustic numbers and even border music all rubbing shoulders over the course of the record's sprawling, monolithic expanse. Without a doubt, it's one of the top ten or so records to truly capture that hazy L.A. atmosphere, and a crucial late-period capstone on the decade's punk funk story just before in mutated into something else entirely.

As such, it brings us full circle to this chapter's beginning, back to L.A., The Red Hot Chili Peppers and where it all ends up in the 90s... with everything tied nicely into a bow. And so I'll leave you with the following playlist, until next time when we descend into the depths of voodoo funk with Material, The Pop Group, The Slits and Public Image Ltd.

1. In fact, the band were initially inspired to form by New York band Defunkt, who we will return to shortly...

2. A cornerstone of the band's early sound, Slovak was the Chili Peppers' original guitarist until 1988, when he died of a heroin overdose. He was replaced by the beloved John Frusciante on the Mother's Milk album.

3. Cliff Martinez was later replaced by Will Ferrell lookalike Chad Smith on the band's fourth album, Mother's Milk.

4. Indeed, during the post punk revival gold rush, it seemed like every band and their dog was claiming influence from the record!

5. Unsurprisingly, these two tracks were Hard's contributions to their best of round up, A Brief History Of The 20th Century.

6. I remember being quite impressed when Woebot included them in his Top 100, which was actually my introduction to his writing in the first place (thanks to a timely link from Simon Reynolds). I distinctly remember being ensconced in the heady atmosphere of the 1808 in the dead of Winter and reading down the list with delight: first Ryuichi Sakamoto, A.R. Kane and then A Certain Ratio and Mark Stewart + Maffia and thinking this is the best list ever!

7. Mick Middles, From Joy Division To New Order (Virgin Books, 1996), 128-129.
8. In fact, I once mixed Black Box Disco into a Moodymann track and it came off like the most natural thing in the world.

9. Check out the charts at the end of Last Night A DJ Saved My Life by Bill Brewster, where one finds tunes like Liquid Liquid's Cavern and ESG's Moody tucked comfortably in the lists for not only Larry Levan's Paradise Garage, but also Frankie Knuckles' Warehouse, Ron Hardy's Music Box and The Roxy. It's a testament to not only these records' utility on the dancefloor, or even the open-minded turntable policy of the clubs themselves, but the fluidity of the era's music across the dancefloors of the day. It all sounded good together in the mix and thus shared the same space in time. And what a time it was!

10. There was also a great compilation of the band's original material (A South Bronx Story) released at the dawn of the 21st century.

LISTEN NOW

TV4 Rockers Revenge

  1. A Certain Ratio Flight (Factory)
  2. ESG Moody (Spaced Out) (99)
  3. Vortex Black Box Disco (Neutral)
  4. Ian Dury And The Blockheads Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick (Stiff)
  5. The Contortions Contort Yourself (ZE)
  6. Minutemen More Joy (New Alliance)
  7. Gang Of Four Return The Gift (EMI)
  8. Delta 5 Train Song (Kill Rock Stars)
  9. Bush Tetras Snakes Crawl (99)
  10. The Red Hot Chili Peppers Blackeyed Blonde (EMI)
  11. Iggy Pop African Man (Arista)
  12. Liquid Liquid Cavern (99)
  13. Grandmaster & Melle Mel White Lines (Don't Don't Do It) (Sugar Hill)
  14. Bernard Wright Spinnin' (Arista)
  15. A Certain Ratio Touch (Factory)
  16. Level 42 Starchild (Polydor)
  17. Tom Browne Funkin' For Jamaica (N.Y.) (Arista)
  18. Ian Dury If I Was With A Woman (Stiff)
  19. Liquid Liquid New Walk (99)
  20. Gang Of Four Womantown (EMI)
  21. Defunkt Strangling Me With Your Love (Hannibal)
  22. The Red Hot Chili Peppers Taste The Pain (EMI)

Soul Machine

Posted on April 11, 2017 @ 10:43pm by Coqui

I recall wandering the vast corridors on an indoor mall only to find a record shop nestled in one of its murky corners. Two separate instances swell from the ocean of memory to overlap: the first was some time ago in the tropics of Camuy on the north side of Puerto Rico, while the second came more recently in the sun-baked heat of Palm Desert. 12" disco dubs in the mall's casual spaces, Jark Prongo records and Dimitri From Paris way back when and Ronnie Laws and Bowie's David Live nestled in the stacks. It brings to mind summer of '98 up in the Bay Area, nights at Mushroom Jazz and long afternoons on the pier. Beginnings at an errant house party, Chicago and The Bucketheads - Street sounds swirling though my mind - with the steaming percussion of Fela Kuti in the mix.

Cut adrift in the dog days after disco had died, in retrospect a golden age when the dancefloor was suffused with the deep dubbed-out flavor of island sounds. It turned out that you couldn't kill it after all, no matter how hard you tried, it lived on in the electroid boogie of D-Train's You're The One For Me and the tropical slow-burning post-disco mirage that had begun to take shape. Wild shapes permeated Larry Levan's lush sonics at The Paradise Garage, the gulf stream drift of Eddy Grant and Grace Jones setting the stage, with Compass Point and the All Stars fleshing it out into four dimensions. The masterful fourth world Juju Music of King Sunny Adé & His African Beats and Tony Allen's Afrobeat 2000 excursion rubbing shoulders with Brian Eno and David Byrne's My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts launched it all into the outerrim.

Wally Badarou's shimmering synths flow through it all at low tide, from Echoes in 1985 through Jamie Principle and Larry Heard's early sides on into Bobby Konders' House Rhythms and beyond - the Nu Groove flavor (Here Comes That Sound Again). Scores of moody 12" records blur the lines between deep house, downbeat hip hop, rave and dub reggae, while a secluded path drops out into Bristol, stretching from Carlton to Massive Attack and a whole new decade on the rise.

The low-slung flavor of The Brothers Palmieri and Harlem River Drive flows just below the surface all along, and the sampladelia laid out by Marley Marl, Prince Paul and The Dust Brothers brings it back into the foreground, mirroring those earlier incursions of low-slung, sun-baked riddims in the era of the breakbeat. Countless groups and their records heed the call, filling out the shoes of Nuggets for the nineties. Perhaps the likes of B.A.D. and Neneh Cherry were the bridge between the twin poles, along with myriad other elements thrown into the blend (as is so often the case).

At any rate it's been there all the time, surfing below the surface like the Vertigo Steel out in Lakeside, representing all the discos that could have been. Multi-colored lights flash against mahogany brown, mirrorball spins in slow-motion to the throbbing pulse of Moroder's tronik disco. The skeletal strains of Morgan Geist's Moves EP and the psychedelic filter disco of Kenny Dixon Jr.'s Silentintroduction bridge the gulf of twenty-odd years, and the raw chicago sonix of Steve Poindexter and DJ Skull get down and dirty with a hard-edged magic all their own. Old Reese records like The Sound and Just Want Another Chance lay the bedrock, Tronik House's Smooth Groove and E-Dancer's The Human Bond too, while Todd Terry's blinding 12" slabs of noise are never far from the turntables.

On the road again in the space between dances, rolling low to the pavement in a little brown Dodge Colt and bumping the sounds of Beck's Deadweight, Scott Weiland's Jimmy Was A Stimulator and The Egyptian Lover's My Beat Goes Boom - 808 beats banging through the vehicle walls down into the steaming asphalt of Mission Gorge Rd. in the blazing heat. Modern Funk Beats soundclash featuring the blurred edges of If Mojo Was A.M. and Carl Craig's skewed take on hip hop. People Make The World Go Round. Nothing wrong with a little history in those grooves, passed down through the years and picking up 'nuff flavor along the way.

Between the proto-hip hop beats of The Meters and Chic's lush disco grooves lies a galaxy of sound; betwixt Gwen Guthrie's neon-spangled shapes and the dusted beats of Cypress Hill lies a lifetime. The blunted corners of those Soul Machine EPs seem to split the difference between the two, spooling out their various strands into a fatback beat before unfurling back again, out into the möbius of time... there's more to come when they inevitably return.

AG Memories: In The Heights

Posted on November 21, 2016 @ 7:20pm by Coqui

Picking up where we last left off, it was January of 2006. I found myself back in the Heights - living with my brother in a spot off El Cajon Blvd. - after a year spent living between Hillcrest and Balboa Park. The neighborhood was my kind of place, with a varied working class population crammed into a timeworn infrastructure that pre-dates the second world war. There was a public library a few blocks away and an excellent bar down the street called Shamrock's that played a selection of vintage rock (of the San Francisco variety) or block rocking hip hop and r&b, depending on the night.1 As Lamont Dozier might say, I was going back to my roots.

A couple of synchronous events had occurred just before the move that colored the next year or so. For one, I discovered Woebot's blog by way of his epochal list of The 100 Greatest Records Ever (via a timely link from Blissblog), which - more than any list I've ever found - seemed to align with my own musical priorities.2 It was uncanny! In truth, I'd only heard about half the records in the list, many of which were among my own favorites, and I'd heard of maybe another 30%; the rest represented a new frontier. It was clear that most of them would be right up my alley, and it was time to get hunting.

There were loads of cool revelations, like how often our favorite records by key artists overlapped: Kraftwerk's Computer World, Herbie Hancock's Sextant, The Velvet Underground's self-titled record, Neu! '75, Rhythim Is Rhythim's The Beginning and Captain Beefheart's Safe As Milk.3 His list also tuned me into the music of Scott Walker, Virgo, Edu Lobo, Brigitte Fontaine and Allen Toussaint, sounds that would come to mean the world to me. This isn't even taking into account the writing itself, which always came off witty and warm, coloring even his most esoteric excursions into the avant garde with a down-to-earth flavor. Without a doubt, discovering Woebot's scurrilous activities in sound remains one of the key moments in my musical life.

The other event that went down toward the end of my time at the 1808 was the near-simultaneous appearance of SA-RA and Hot Chip on the pop music landscape: two crews that were so very tailored to my tastes that it was almost comical. There's a piece I've been working up centered around their appearance (in light of the recent Hot Chip show), but for now suffice it to say came along at just the right time for where I was at in 2005.

Moodymann's recent Black Mahogani LP was fast overtaking Silentintroduction as my favorite record of his, and I'd been diving deeper into disco and garage than I'd ever been able to before. The output of labels like West End and Easy Street were in constant rotation, along with some other things that I'd been turned onto by one Kenny Dixon Jr.4 There were loads of greet electro-boogie records to be found for pennies (an ongoing obsession), things like Ray Parker Jr.'s Woman Out Of Control and One Way's Who's Foolin' Who.5 SA-RA dropping at this point only served to bring my various obsessions into focus.

Shamrock's had tuned me into a whole bunch of hip hop and r&b around this time, along with a number or choice rock selections. This the era when Comets On Fire dropped their masterstroke, Avatar, sending me into the past digging up a bunch of storied Head Heritage material like Pentagram, the first three Blue Öyster Cult LPs and early Grand Funk Railroad.6 Augmenting old favorites like the Groundhogs, MC5 and Blue Cheer (not to mention Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin and Van Halen, of which my brother was a huge fan), it provided the soundtrack to that summer.

Barney Hoskyns' Hotel California had just come out around this time, illuminating the context around the Laurel Canyon scene in L.A. (something I was a bit thin on). Nearly everything I already knew I'd found out by simply following the various lines of flight from The Byrds' orbit. Things like Gene Clark's solo records, The Flying Burrito Bros and Crosby, Stills & Nash. Which then connects to Buffalo Springfield and Neil Young/Crazy Horse, not to mention of the early solo albums by David Crosby, Stephen Stills and Graham Nash. That's how it works, this music thing, you go from node to node. Hotel California fleshed it all out, and provided the impetus to dig a little deeper.

All of which sets the stage for the second era of Radio AG, a period stretching from the dawn of 2006 to the close of 2007. I finally had a proper setup for my decks again (I'd had them laid out on the floor at the 1808). The mixes from 2006 were all coming to terms with the above tributaries, threading them into a matrix of groove-based music and taking the intended audience just a little deeper into the realm. There's that one mix where I played out the entirety of Halleluwah because it seemed like the right thing to do. The lions share of the year's mixes were from the summertime, and it shows. Lot's of high desert action, dry and dusty.

2007 was really the sea change. The winter mix was the first where I was really able to run wild with a consistent atmosphere, opening with Asmus Tietchens and closing with When The Levee Breaks. Everything had an glacial cast to it, from an unreleased Kelis tune to late-period Gentle Giant and early Simple Minds (a perennial favorite), it came on like an icy gust of wind. The next few mixes got deeper and deeper into beats, which is something I'd always meant to do. Drexciya, Scan 7 and Theo Parrish. The table was finally set.

At the end of the year, G.B. loaned me a stack of records with the stated mission to make a mix out of them. The result was Episode 012. It was a great experience, working with a bunch of records I'd never heard before (I was only familiar with something like five of them), and on the whole pleasantly disorienting (like one imagines deep sea diving to be). Especially eye-opening were the Sneakmove Minicomps and the records on Bully, which were great breakbeat-driven slabs of noise seemingly built atop live drums.7

The uniting thread throughout was a sort of post-rock, post-everything even, selection of sounds. There were beats that seemed to blur the lines between IDM and abstract hip hop, like the remix of Boom Bip by Boards Of Canada. There was James Figurine's cover of Other 99 (an old Big Audio Dynamite song that became the name of my original blog back in 2003) along with a G.B. original. It was a fascinating realm to spend some time in, resulting in the second true winter mix. Coming at the close of 2007, it's also the perfect way to close out the second chapter of the Radio AG saga.

And then, a long break...

1. Sadly, the place closed down about seven years ago, ultimately being replaced by a hookah lounge.
2. At the time, your typical list seemed to take in 90% classic rock with token soul, jazz, hip hop and - if you're really lucky - electronic entries.
3. Whereas the canonical picks at the time would have looked something like this: Kraftwerk - Trans-Europe Express, Herbie Hancock - Maiden Voyage or Head Hunters, The Velvet Underground & Nico, Neu!'s debut, Rhythim Is Rhythim - Nude Photo and Captain Beefheart - Trout Mask Replica.
4. Take for instance his DEMF set (available on Groovetech), where he opened with Gil Scott-Heron & Brian Jackson's We Almost Lost Detroit before running through Curtis Mayfield and William DeVaughn chestnuts, ultimately settling into a boogie groove with The Brides Of Funkenstein and André Cymone.
5. I'd been seeking out this one for ages. It turned up on the floor of some indie rock shop for 50 cents and was the only record I bought that day. Cutie Pie was one of my key jams circa '93 that for whatever reason was in heavy rotation along with The Isley Brothers' Between The Sheets and Kleeer's Tonight on Jammin' Z90. I'd taped them all off the radio, along with Ice Cube's It Was A Good Day, Duice's Dazzey Duks and The Geto Boys' Six Feet Deep, on what was the first tape I ever made.
6. I'd actually bought a couple of their later records way back in the day based on their name alone, and Snakes and I had sampled some material for some of our earlier beats (see G-Street, for one).
7. It makes perfect sense that they reissued the Silver Apples compilation, as that duo seem like the logical ancestor to their sound.

People Make The World Go Round

Posted on October 12, 2016 @ 8:40pm by Coqui

Cruising down University to the sounds of the C2 Remix of Innerzone Orchestra's People Make The World Go Round, in the cool Autumn air of the early evening as the sun settles on the horizon. People everywhere, going about their business: walking the sidewalks and the crosswalks, driving through these city streets, humanity in motion. People make the world go round. Breakbeats roll out in cascading layers beneath the clipped sequences of pure machine soul.

Dusk descends and the Kenny Dixon, Jr. Remix begins to unfold, palm trees silhouetted against violet skies as Norma Jean Bell works her saxophone and Mr. Bubz Fiddler springs into action on bass. The sounds of Axelrod and Adderley flow like tributaries through the bedrock, a jazz mosaic set in stark relief against the geology of a place where the desert meets the sea.

In the words of Winston Zeddmore, I love this town!

AG Memories: Rusty Waters

Posted on September 19, 2016 @ 8:50pm by Coqui

Looking down from the Georgia Street bridge, into North Park and the place where it all went down, and the memories of the early days of Radio AG come flooding back.


While uploading the first five episodes of Radio AG over the past few weeks, I was struck by how rough a lot of the mixing was! Sure, partially this was down to being rusty (I'd taken a hiatus from spinning and music production to concentrate on finishing school), but I also suspect it was due to the fact that for the first time I was grappling with a lot of material that wasn't typically intended to be found in the mix.

Up until then, I'd primarily spun techno and house, on the one hand, or downbeat rap and trip hop, on the other. Mixing disparate selections from the sixties, alternative, new wave and so forth - much of it music that wasn't made with the DJ in mind - well, it was like learning to mix all over again. The first year was pretty ramshackle, truth be told, but it was an enjoyable experiment in figuring how to segue between tracks of such varying structure and sequence them to successfully carry a sustained mood (I wouldn't figure out the latter until the following year!)

In retrospect, I'd always tended to approach spinning from more of an electro/hip hop mindset anyway, playing with cuts and juxtaposition, whereas the general tendency with minimal techno at the time was to work gradual fades between similar tunes. The pivotal moment for me was hearing Kevin Saunderson scratch into Carl Craig's Piano Mix of R-Tyme's Use Me (on his X-Mix: Transmission From Deep Space Radio mix): this was everything I wanted dance music to be. On the flipside - the trip hop side - Terranova's DJ-Kicks was a revelatory experience, boasting a broad selection taking in hip hop, dub, post punk, electro and Detroit techno, all while maintaining a consistently vivid atmosphere throughout. Listening to both of these mixes for the first time - within months of each other! - was quite simply a mind-expanding experience, changing the way I listened to music from that point forward.

As such, when I put together the original Allied Heights mix (back in 2002), it already seemed natural to drop things like The B-52's Mesopotamia and Brian Eno & David Byrne's The Jezebel Spirit - not to mention Derrick May's remix of Tired Of Getting Pushed Around for 2 Men A Drum Machine And A Trumpet - in the mix alongside prime techno cuts like Scan 7's Black Moon Rising, The Martian's Meet The Red Planet and UR's Electronic Warfare, opening up plenty of real-estate for raw house material like the KSR Vocal Mix of Octave One's Blackwater, Susumu Yokota's discoid fantasy Future Memory and Carl Craig's awesome garage-tinged A-Dub Mix of The Reese Project's I Believe. There were even a couple brand new Shadez Of Colour cuts - that were just about to be pressed up at NSC in Detroit - slipped into the mix. It was a nice little mix that captured a time when things where humming in the Heights and it seemed as if it would go on that way forever...

But I'd be out of the game in a matter of months, commencing a roughly two-year period during which school, work and other real world commitments managed to monopolize my time completely. The music was still there, however, and I'd spent those years exploring other sounds: lines of flight into the wider world via the post punk (PIL, Mark Stewart, etc.) and reggae (King Tubby, Horace Andy, etc.) that I'd become aware of thanks to trip hop, and the funk (Parliament/Funkadelic, Sly & The Family Stone, etc.), synth (Kraftwerk, YMO, etc.) and jazz (Herbie Hancock, Sun Ra, etc.) music that techno had tuned me into along the way. Winding back through seventies soul into the sixties - Stax and Motown - on a similar tip and sideways into krautrock, prog and arty seventies music like Roxy Music (by way of Brian Eno), it was only a matter of time before I'd worked my way back into the sixties: The Beatles, The Byrds, Hendrix and beyond.

At the end of 2004, I moved out with a couple of mates into a spot over by Balboa Park that we came to call the 1808. The scene that coalesced around the place centered on what you might call the indie rock set, with various bands and scenesters in orbit, doing their thing. I was mainly rocking out to grime like Wiley's Treddin' On Thin Ice, Dizzee Rascal's second album and the Run The Road compilation, plus Roni Size's Return To V - which seemed to key into the same prevailing mood - along with Moodymann's Black Mahogani, Amp Fiddler's Waltz Of A Ghetto Fly and Theo Parrish (with material like The Rotating Assembly's Rusty Waters in constant rotation). There was a solid weekly techno night at the Honey Bee Hive (just up the street), and I did manage to catch the odd desert rave with Snakes and crew, but all of a sudden it seemed like indie rock was everywhere and dance was hard to find. This felt something like the wilderness years, and I was a stranger in a strange land.

So I decided to go back to my roots and start a mixtape series that would take in a bunch of the stuff I grew up on, before I'd even really struck out on my own, musically speaking. I'd basically started out in new wave with Adam Ant and Depeche Mode, along with eighties dance pop like the Jacksons Michael and Janet, before hip hop and swingbeat rolled into town. So why not start there - since this was more or less the lingua franca of my intended audience anyway - sprinkling in an ever increasing dose of beats and atmosphere along the way? Radio AG was born.

The idea at first was to construct a mix in the same way the closing song cycle from the second side of Abbey Road was structured, drifting from one pop song to the next in a kinetic flow. Along with my bedrock of past favorites, I'd lean on everything I'd picked up in the interim, ranging from Can to The Beach Boys and even some of the indie stuff I'd picked up like the Pixies (rock hard beats for miles) and Pavement (whose Jackals, False Grails: The Lonesome Era is basically a breakbeat dance track). Going back into the nineties, my hip uncle Matt from Chicago had tuned me into all sorts of great power pop and indie dance (like Blur, Happy Mondays and so on) that had a profound shaping influence on me at the time. This material flowed logically into groups like Gorillaz (Albarn and Ryder, together), A.R. Kane and The Beta Band that I'd later crossed paths with via dance music, and all of it would in turn form part of the foundation of the series.

So I did one mix, and then another. And then another. By October, I'd knocked out a fifth episode - The Halloween Special - and the series had become a reality. I was pulling in shipments from Submerge on a monthly basis, their shelves still stocked with the finest Detroit techno in abundance. A few months later, I crossed paths with SA-RA and Hot Chip. Woebot dropped his 100 Greatest Records Ever on New Years Day. Suddenly things didn't seem so lonely anymore. And then, couple weeks later I'd move in with my brother Brian - the same place where I live today - and dig into the next chapter of the Radio AG saga. But that's another story for another day!

Two Steps From The Blues

Posted on August 22, 2016 @ 8:36pm by Coqui

A selection of murky blues and dirty beats mixed by DJ Slye.

I recently came across this riotous, blazing mix by Woebot that he terms this grungey, mutated R'n'B-derived sound. In a weird bit of synchronicity I've been crossing a similar terrain lately. In truth, it's a place where I dwell much of the time.

I've recently been ruminating on this intersection between post punk, trip hop and the blues that's sort of tangentially related to some of the shapes he throws in this mix. This is partially down to working my way through A Cracked Jewel Case - long stretches of which run parallel to my own fascinations and obsessions in sound - but also it's a very definite strand of sound that's pretty central to my own musical make up.

In fact, I've long had a loose selection of tracks rolling around that all occupy a similar space in my mind and thought, Why not throw them all together in a mix and see what happens? The end result is a bit of a low slung, moody affair... but then I wouldn't have it any other way.

  1. Skip James Cypress Grove Blues (Yazoo)

    2. We start out deep down in the Mississippi Delta, way back in 1931, with Skip James and some of the mightiest blues ever laid down. This is an ancient, desolate sound: loneliness captured on wax. There's this haunting character to James' vocals - his playing too - that really puts you in the room with him.

  2. Goodie Mob Cell Therapy (featuring Brandon "Shug" Bennett) (LaFace)

    3. Fast-forward 64 years and Dirty South enters the popular consciousness. This paranoid crawl through shadowy imagery of black helicopters, looming fences and the security state features state of the art production from Organized Noise, yet there's an unmistakable grit here that ties everything back to the Delta.

  3. Drugs Brain On Drugs (Kraked)

    4. Psychedelic soul from the turn of the century. Various players from the contemporary touring lineup of Parliament/Funkadelic get down in the studio with this strange slab of hallucinatory sprawl. In many ways, this is like the midpoint between SA-RA and Moodymann. There was even an excellent deep house remix of this tune on a 12" by French duo Château Flight.

  4. Mark Stewart + Maffia Survival (Mute)

    5. The massive geometric rhythm here has always reminded me of the desolate, wide-open spaces of certain old electric blues records. I think the Maffia certainly do have a bit of the blues in them - filtered through an angular, cyberpunk shaped prism, but there nonetheless - and their early recordings as the Sugar Hill house band bear this out. See also No Wave and Cabaret Voltaire.

  5. Martina Topley-Bird Too Tough To Die (Independiente)

    6. Taken from her solo debut after parting ways with Tricky. Quixotic is of a piece with Tricky Kid's earlier records - thoroughly imbued as they were with Martina's indelible presence - and this track in particular makes the strong blues nature of her microphone presence explicit. Ensconced within the grinding rhythms of this gnarled bit of modern blues, she seems as comfortable in the form as a Bessie Smith or Billie Holiday.

  6. Dr. John Black Widow Spider (ATCO)

    7. Martina's voodoo-steeped soul segues into the New Orleans swamp-blues of Dr. John, from sophomore album Babylon. In his autobiography, Under A Hoodoo Moon, Dr. John states, "We were trying to get into something... with visions of the end of the world — as if Hieronymus Bosch had cut an album."

  7. Tricky 6 Minutes (Island)

    8. The first half of Angels With Dirty Faces is among the densest, most atmospheric music in Tricky's oeuvre, rivalling even the Nearly God record and his collaboration with the Gravediggaz on The Hell E.P.. Much of the best trip hop is suffused with the spectre of the blues, and this rolling monster of a track - with that nagging looped guitar figure - is positively drenched in it.

  8. Howlin' Wolf Who's Been Talkin' (Chess)

    9. This is likely my favorite blues song bar none, taken from my most treasured blues LP of all time by my absolute favorite bluesman. That endless, tumbling rhythm seems to predict machine music in its precise repetition, while its stark shapes and spooked-out mood prefigure both post punk and trip hop's modus operandi, respectively. As usual, Wolf himself tears through it all like a man possessed.

  9. Terranova Sweet Bitter Love (featuring Cath Coffey) (Copasetik)

    10. The geometric rhythms in evidence here throw similar shadows, only now as if seen through a blurred lense. Sweet Bitter Love, taken from Terranova's first album, is of a piece with their earlier Tokyo Tower record. The title track and its b-side Clone seemed to encompass jazz, blues and Krautrock in one stroke while remaining trip hop through and through. Here, the sumptuous blues tone of Cath Coffey's voice inhabits the bleak soundscape with a gravity all her own.

  10. Gil Scott-Heron Me And The Devil (XL)

    11. This is the lead single from Gil Scott-Heron's final record, and it hits you in the chest straight out the gate with it's apocalyptic tone and cinematic force. The deep, smooth croon of his seventies records has grown into the rough and ragged voice of a man who's seen one thing too many - this is 21st century blues.

  11. Dark Comedy In My Home (Poussez!)

    12. The second Dark Comedy record, from 2005, just might be my favorite thing Kenny Larkin has ever done. This is deep and moody electronic blues from Detroit, a primal swamp of a record with more than a dose a black humor to it... made all the more unsettling in its juxtaposition with dead-serious subject matter on the flipside. In My Home recounts an episode around the time of his Metaphor LP - ten years earlier - when he was shot in his home during an attempted robbery.

  12. Ray Charles It's All Right (Atlantic)

    13. The original soul man's second album, and a true masterpiece of piano-laced rhythm & blues. This one's of a piece with the Howlin' Wolf selection above as some of my favorite blues music ever, with Charles here in the process of shaping it into what would soon become soul music. The Raelets' exquisite backing vocals haunt this track, the dense atmosphere of which evokes the same sense of dread one might expect in a killer trip hop cut some 35 years later.

  13. Tom Waits Clap Hands (Island)

    14. L.A.'s odd man out, this is the second in Waits' trilogy of avant garde eighties records. This tune always stayed with me, its spooked chords unfold over rolling percussion that sounds as if it were played out on hollow bones, the man's raspy croon smack in the middle as he unfurls another one of his dead end backstreet tales. They all went to heaven in a little row boat, that line always gets me. Pure dread.

  14. Bobby Bland I'll Take Care Of You (Duke)

    15. More spectral blues-bathed soul. A key record in that continuum, and a stone cold classic. This is another one of those tunes, where the atmosphere just swirls around you - encircling your entire field of vision - as Bland's piercing vocal climbs through its murky slow-motion organ runs. Later covered by Gil-Scott Heron in fine style on I'm New Here, the same record that houses Me And The Devil.

  15. Otis Rush My Love Will Never Die (Take Unknown) (Varèse Sarabande)

    16. Electric blues shot through with that same steely cold sense of mystery you'll find in Who's Been Talkin' and I'll Take Care Of You (indeed much of the downbeat blues music from this era is cloaked in it). Otis Rush is a giant vocal presence, his guitar figures hang there in suspended animation like glyphs on a brick wall. I'm always half expecting this song to show up in some Tarantino film.

  16. Aretha Franklin The Thrill Is Gone (From Yesterday's Kiss) (Atlantic)

    17. Smoldering southern soul from the great Aretha Franklin. The swelling Hammond that shades into her piano's wraithlike progression, paired with backing vocals from The Sweet Inspirations - steeped in that same haunting flavor that the Raelets lent so effortlessly - provide the perfect environment for Franklin's deep soul stylings. This has long been one of my key downbeat soul numbers. Indeed, in my mind this forms a loose tetralogy with Who's Been Talkin', It's All Right and I'll Take Care Of You, songs whose spectral ambience inform whole swathes of my taste in music.

  17. The Jimi Hendrix Experience Voodoo Chile (Reprise)

    18. Supercharged rock-hard blues from Master Hendrix. From that first sustained note, bending into the heavy silence, this just builds and builds like a great flaming galleon adrift in slow motion across the night sky. Steve Winwood does serious damage here with his smoldering Hammond runs (glowing like embers in the darkness) as Hendrix's blazing guitar figures arc across the soundscape. The night I was born I swear the moon turned a fire red. Very likely indeed.

  18. Jelly Roll Morton Winin' Boy Blues No. 2 (Rounder)

    19. Back in the early days of Napster, a good friend of mine offered to download a couple tunes for me (I didn't yet have access to that sort of thing at the time). My two requests were Tainted Love and anything by Jelly Roll Morton. This is the tune that he turned up, and it stuck with me for years until I eventually tracked it down on volume four of this Library Of Congress set. To this day, it still knocks me out like it did the first time I heard it. That whimsical melody and Morton's rich croon - it's just perfection.

Mixed By: DJ Slye
Inspirations: Tricky, In The Studio With The Special AKA, Woebot's I've Got Blisters On My Fingers! mix, A Cracked Jewel Case by Kevin Pearce, Trip Hop - The Blues Of Our Time

Deep Space Music (Slight Return)

Posted on February 25, 2016 @ 5:55pm by Coqui

A few years back, I started a limited series in which I'd post a weekly tune that was locked into the celestial. I called it Deep Space Music. It was loosely inspired, as is much of what I do, by something a bunch of forward-thinking cats did in Detroit back in the day. In this case, it was Deep Space Radio, a series of transmissions made in the mid-nineties in which people like Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson would spin far out techno and house over the city's airwaves, culminating in Saunderson's masterful X-Mix: Transmission From Deep Space Radio mix.

My own excursion was a much more minimal affair, hosted on the old version of this very site, titled (rather unimaginatively) Deep Space Music. It involved simply tossing up one tune a week - for just under a year - from one summer to another, spanning between 2012 and 2013. The idea was that each song would flow into the next as one long suite, thematically speaking, the patchwork whole unfolding like the weekly sci-fi serials of old. At any rate, it proved to be an enjoyable exercise and hopefully tuned some people into some great music in the process.

In researching a monster piece I've been working on lately (and coming at you in the near future), I'd been digging through the interplanetary archives and - in the process - discovered a tracklist of all the tunes that featured in the series. I'd nearly forgotten about the whole enterprise, but seeing as it fits in thematically with the trip we've been on lately I thought it might be illuminating to beam the results back to earth, commenting on each selection in the process.

You'll notice that a lot of these tunes have continued to crop up in the intervening years, via mixes and even featured in The Parallax 100, which should highlight the centrality of this selection to my own musical tastes. All of these should be relatively easy to get your ears on nowadays, via Youtube or some other means (like picking up the record, perhaps), so if something sounds enticing you know what to do...

Engage!

  1. Ashford & Simpson Babies (Dub Version) (Capitol, 1984)

    2. The journey starts with rolling drums and guitars chiming off into the event horizon. Spacious pads with a graviational pull all their own drift through the mix, that gently chugging bassline seems to propel this ship through the vastness of space in ethereal slow-motion. Don't you know that I live for this sort of thing? This a François Kevorkian perpertrated dub of Ashford & Simpson's original (from their Solid LP), stretching it out across timespace with just a snatch of the original vocal. When Nickolas Ashford drops right into the mix, singing The love story's true, they didn't change me and you..., the track seems to stop and rebuild itself right before your eyes.

  2. Mtume The After 6 Mix (Juicy Fruit Part II) (Epic, 1983)

    3. Another flipside excursion, another featuring just a snatch of vocal input and another one of my favorite songs of all time. The original has one of the great synth progressions ever, pulling you in with a gliding futuristic optimism (think Tommorowland), but this second part - stripping the track to its essentials - is true space capsule music. You find yourself waiting for the synthesized bass sound that just oozes into the track every other bar. Hearing this for the first time was one of those pivotal moments in my life, like a parallel universe unfolding before me, and everything contained within was right up my alley. I remember rustling up the album and 12" within weeks!

    This tune and much of what follows are what I like to call Machine Soul, in essence a sonic strand stretching from Mtume through Model 500, into Timbaland and beyond.

  3. Kleeer Tonight (Atlantic, 1984)

    4. This one takes me back to sun-glazed days in late summer, playing video games on the Atari 2600 (truly ancient technology by that point in the mid-nineties), tripping out to Solaris and the sound of machine rhythms in the scorching heat. This track was the basis for DJ Quik's Tonite, its rubberband, synthetic bassline spreading deep into the DNA of g-funk. True machine soul, you can picture yourself listening in some perfectly-engineered alien vessel, gliding over a neon vector landscape in the night.

  4. Drexciya Running Out Of Space (Tresor, 1999)

    5. Perfection in just under two minutes, this would lend itself to a killer 7" single. That's a whole category unto itself. Sounding almost as if Tonight were fast-forwarded - all sonics twisted and filtered through fifteen years of electro boogie science - the track swoops and shudders on a nimble machine-funk rhythm before dissolving into a majestic, beatless coda. You could run a starship on that. Drexciya of course representing the life aquatic, they seem to be just as much at home in the deep black of space.

  5. Slam Visions (featuring Dot Allison) (Soma, 2001)

    6. Turn-of-the-century Glasgow. A killer pop song seemingly sprung from the subconscious. The atmosphere heavy like a black hole, that shrouded bassline rising from within, drawing you deeper and deeper into gravity's pull. At the center of it all is Dot Allison), serenading the night skies in a druggy murmur. The song explodes into some psychedelic vision of deep space r&b, glowing shards of funky synthetic sound spiralling off into the stratosphere, northern lights ablaze.

  6. Keni Stevens Night Moves (Ultra-Sensual Mix) (Elite, 1985)

    7. I've gone digital about this one before. You're gliding across the grid, vectors scrolling under a moonlit sky, landscapes parallaxing in the distance. Keni Stevens drapes his absolute smoothest, most delicate voice over an elegant neon-lit groove, all the parts moving in perfect unity. The vocal and instrumental versions of the Ultra-Sensual Mix run together on the vinyl, giving you eleven and a half minutes of supersonic pleasure.

  7. Sun Palace Rude Movements (Passion, 1983)

    8. I've noted before (another repeat!) how this record comes on like Carl Craig and Hall & Oates making music together in an elevator. I stand by that. Eighties smooth jazz isn't supposed to sound this exciting, but every element in this tune mixes together into the perfect palette and, against all odds, feels absolutely timeless. The perfect (quiet) storm.

  8. Yage Theme From Hot Burst (Jumpin' & Pumpin', 1992)

    9. An exclusive from the excellent Earthbeat compilation, an indispensable round-up of glistening techno produced by a pre-FSOL Dougans and Cobain. Crystalline synths drift whimsical over stuttering breakbeats, muted rave sounds trill just below the surface, with everything submerged in a deep, oceanic calm. Almost freeform in its construction, this track simply shimmers.

  9. The Isley Brothers Voyage To Atlantis (T-Neck, 1997)

    10. Why don't The Isley Brothers get more love? They're easily the equal of giants like Led Zeppelin or Stevie Wonder. What gives? They have loads of great records. This from their seventies 3 + 3 period - when the group's ranks swelled to six - in which they operated as purveyors of fine funk and peerless, sun-glazed soul. Voyage To Atlantis itself sways in stately slow-motion, exit music for a film. Cosmic, elegaic and beautiful.

  10. The Jimi Hendrix Experience 1983...(A Merman I Should Turn To Be) (Reprise, 1968)

    11. Aquatic, like Drexciya, but in tune with the cosmos. Hendrix got his start playing guitar with The Isleys before going down in history as arguably the greatest guitarist of all (the Forever riff in this song is one of the most inspiring things I've ever heard done with an electric guitar). This record finds him equally adept at using the studio as an instrument unto itself, rolling various movements and spaced out interludes into a nearly fourteen-minute sonic tapestry that works seamlessly as one long, flowing piece. The result is simply breathtaking.

  11. Fluke Kitten Moon (Astralwerks, 1997)

    12. The better part of this album, Risotto, is pretty spaced out as a rule, and I could have used anything from the blunted black hole trip Bermuda to the alien frequencies of Reeferendum to make the same point. However, Kitten Moon eclipses all other candidates with its relentless, chugging rhythm and a drop into pure atmosphere that leaves you standing on the edge of infinity.

  12. Kleeer Tonight (SA-RA Remix featuring The SA-RA All Stars & Me'Shell NdegéOcello) (Rhino, 2005)

    13. The original Kleeer classic (heard above) has a long history of affection among electronic funk connoisseurs. SA-RA turn in what is, in truth, more an outright cover than a remix. I love how they take the relatively minimal original - a tune that seems deeply influential to their own group's aesthetic - and go all out with it, stretching out in widescreen with a big band in tow (including the inimitable Me'Shell NdegéOcello), with no expense spared. Sparkling in the discotheque.

  13. Octave One Nicolette (430 West, 1991)

    14. Octave One embody a certain sonic perfection, working out the internal logic of techno and house to arrive at a streamlined form that sounds unlike anything else. This from their classic Octivation EP, following on the heels of their debut I Believe. Detuned bleeps spill out from a low slung rhythm, the fusion of shuffling 909 beats and a wandering analog bassline, synth washes flowing beneath it all in such a way that r&b stations should've been playing it. In a word, DEEP.

  14. Joe Gibbs & The Professionals Idlers Rest (Joe Gibbs, 1977)

    15. Intergalactic dub reggae, sounding not unlike SA-RA holed up at the Black Ark. Hard to believe it's from 1977. Rock hard beats and bottomless bass kick into gear with siren synths blazing high up above. This from the second volume in Joe Gibbs' excellent African Dub All-Mighty series, which I was lucky enough to snag at Reggae World some years back (and just in time to spin at a New Years Eve party later that night).

  15. Leon Ware Tamed To Be Wild (United Artists, 1972)

    16. Motorik machine soul from the first solo shot by this songwriter in the shadows. Think Suicide. Leon Ware growls over a chugging blues beat, rolling pianos and electronic bass that zig-zags beneath brooding verses before exploding into that near-gospel chorus. Ancient synths droning into infinity. It's all very Warp Records. Ware well-documented as a songwriting auteur, with Motown and Marvin Gaye, in particular (look no further than I Want You for the proof), benefiting from his way with the pen. Check those credits - from Quincy Jones to Minnie Riperton to The Jackson Five - he's everywhere!.

  16. Jackson And His Computer Band Utopia (Warp, 2005)

    17. I remember being stumped as to how to follow up the previous track - so doggedly singular was that grinding tronik soul stormer - but this convoluted electro/house burner from the French auteur Jackson Fourgeaud did the trick. Intricate and overloaded, this track is - simply put - a monster. The whole of it seems constructed from shards of sound - electronic glitches and vocal snatches - shattered into a million pieces only to be reconstructed into a skewed vision of disco, churning under waves of droning sonics before dropping out into that heavenly chorus. Have you ever thought about utopia? Utterly bizarre, yet I challenge anyone not to be hooked by the second listen.

  17. Beanfield Keep On Believing (Compost, 1997)

    18. My brother Matt and I used to be obsessed with this tune. Still are, truth be told. One of my go-to tracks in defense of the practice of sampling. This tune essentially mashes up Vangelis' Let It Happen and the batucada drums from Costa-Gavras' Z (Mikis Theodorakis in full effect), filtering them through deep space sonics and winding up with something utterly singular. But where did those blues vocals come from?

  18. Medeski Martin + Wood Midnight Birds (SA-RA Remix) (Main) (Blue Note, 2005)

    19. More SA-RA. They're all over the place in this break out! The MMM original is a swaying mirage of interstellar exotica, but the SA-RA version takes it on a wild, tangled trip into the unknown. Busting out wrongfooted on the 4/4 - like if J Dilla made a house track - this multi-part dancefloor burner seems fueled on unstable elements, kicking into a juke joint mid-section before it all collapses inna staggering machine rhythm that just disolves into stray synths in the moonlight. The life and death of a star.

  19. Jay Dee Think Twice (BBE, 2001)

    20. Speaking of J Dilla, this deep slab of downbeat bliss from Welcome 2 Detroit is the square root of all manner of twisted machine soul that's tumbled out of this blessed millennium so far. This could go on for hours and I wouldn't get bored. The Donald Byrd bit that goes Your love's like fire and ice, that's why we've got to think twice, followed by a little trumpet flourish, is catchier than most songs you hear on the radio. Then it flies off on a variation, the piano jukes then goes left, before once again drifting somewhere else entirely.

  20. Smith & Mighty DJ-Kicks/I Don't Know (featuring Alice Perera) (12" Mix 1) (Studio !K7, 1998)

    21. It's beginning to feel almost as if I subconsciously drew from this nearly forgotten list when mixing last year's Radio AG transmissions! I suppose that speaks to their closeness to my heart (aww!). This one's so tied up with my own memories and experiences that I don't know where to begin. You just want to curl up inside the warmth of this song. In the surrounding context, it plays like a companion piece to The Martian's Sex In Zero Gravity: a love from outer space.

  21. Me'Shell NdegéOcello Come Smoke My Herb (Maverick, 2003)

    22. Comfort Woman - the record from which this track springs - is on some serious Hendrix-level astral plane, its space rock dynamics swooping and shuddering in graceful slow-motion through the reggaematic machinery of dub. This is deep space as a return to the womb, and it's the swooning blur of Come Smoke My Herb that offers up the record's simplest, most exquisite pleasure: walking on air.

  22. Divine Styler In A World Of U (Maverick, 2003)

    23. In between Styler's old school debut and underground return lies Spiral Walls Containing Autumns Of Light, a record that draws on space rock, industrial and fusion as much as hip hop. This tune in particular is coming from somewhere else! There's that inevitable, descending chord progression - guitars running through sheets of chorus, trilling off into delicate metallic solos - rolling drums and Divine Styler's druggy murmur at the center of it all, cut adrift in wholly expansive innnerspace.

  23. The Police Walking On The Moon (A&M, 1979)

    24. Everybody knows this one, and for good reason. Andy Sumner's guitars chime into the endless deep while Stewart Copeland taps out a beat that seems to obey the laws of lunar gravity rather than the Earth's, and Sting sounds without a care in the world. I remember a particularly dark night back in the day when I listened to this song on repeat, non-stop until I eventually drifted off to sleep.

  24. Simple Minds Veldt (Arista, 1979)

    25. Early Simple Minds records are doubtless a treasure trove of weird new wave, but you'll also find some of the most atmospheric instrumentals of their era... or any other for that matter. Perfectly conjuring up visions of the titular African plains at dusk, strange shapes shifting in the darkness, this brings to mind Suburban Knight's The Art Of Stalking. I swear that you can hear mid-period FSOL in this densely articulated atmosphere. The first time I heard it, I thought What's going on now?! Today it might be my favorite thing on the album.

  25. Dexter Wansel Solutions (Philadelphia International, 1978)

    26. Philly soul craftsman gets loose in the studio, shearing into incandescent jazz funk. The song drifts in and out into radio transmissions - presumably picked up in deep space - chronicling the struggles of present-day Earth. Not much has changed! Wansel croons in silk over luminescent organs and a rubber-synth bassline, fragile and exquisite. A minor r&b hit at the time, it's a wonder this tune isn't more widely known.

  26. The Steve Miller Band Sacrifice (Capitol, 1977)

    27. Glorious tripped out pop-psychedelia from the original space cowboy. Crystalline rhodes shimmer in the moonlight over a downbeat rhythm, while Steve Miller pulls liquid shapes from his guitar and sings moody lines in the foreground. I've always been a sucker for that vibrato thing he tends to do with his voice: What a sacrifiyiyice.... This is, in essence, a jazz funk record. Which leads us into...

  27. Roy Ayers Ubiquity The Memory (Polydor, 1976)

    28. DEEP jazz funk. The deepest. Drawing you slow-motion tumbling into a black hole, shadows and sound swirling all around, it seems to have a gravity all its own. Feel Surreal. Those drums are rock hard, pounding a tripped-out beat while deep Moog bass textures curl beneath. Liquid keys shimmer and gamma ray ARPs stream like sunlight through the darkness. Innerspace music and subconscious soul, this track embodies the haunting words of its refrain.

  28. Marvin Gaye A Funky Space Reincarnation (Tamla, 1978)

    29. Taken from Gaye's exquisite kiss off Here, My Dear. I remember buying the record thinking, Well, it's supposed to be one of his weaker ones but I love What's Going On and then being completely blown away. A Funky Space Reincarnation has Gaye drifting through images of mental deep space travel over a downbeat disco rhythm - sort of half-singing/half-rapping - commenting on the sights he encounters along the way and putting the moves on Miss Birdsong. Strangely enough, this always makes me think of those rolling ambient house numbers by The Orb like Perpetual Dawn and Toxygene, gently unfurling on an astral plane.

  29. Bobby Lyle Inner Space (Capitol, 1978)

    30. I first heard this in a Kirk Degiorgio mix and couldn't believe my ears. This came out when? How?? It's the secret ancestor to Carl Craig's gaussian-blurred ambient excursions like Neurotic Behavior and A Wonderful Life, and a glorious track in its own right.

  30. Psyche Neurotic Behavior (Planet E, 1989)

    31. Which brings us to this, which strangely had the opposite effect: I couldn't believe it had come out so recently. Breathtakingly cinematic and vast in scope, it sounds simultaneously ancient and futuristic, like a sleek alien structure that the scientists can't seem to date. I remember compiling the Parallax 100 and originally planning to include 4 Jazz Funk Classics, but just couldn't resist this record's exquisite shades and absorbing timbres. Elements is in that grey area of compilations that pull from just one or two years - see also The Three EPs by The Beta Band - but it just works too well as an album in its own right. It gets the pass! And just because his first stuff is my absolute favorite doesn't mean I don't love the rest of it... the man has gone from strength to strength, one of the most consistently compelling producers around.

  31. The Martian Skypainter (Red Planet, 1995)

    32. Motorik deep space drive. I've been a big fan of Red Planet for ages, and if I'm not mistaken have everything the label put out (there might be a Somewhere In Detroit record lingering, I can't remember). At the time I just couldn't get ahold of the records, try as I might. I first heard this and Midnite Sunshine (and, come to think of it the very next track as well) on Submerge's Depth Charge 3, a round-up of tracks that from their extended crew. I was in heaven.

  32. Freq Waveaura (Matrix, 1995)

    33. This is the other one from that compilation, although its original home was a label compilation for Matrix Records (Sean Deason's label). As far as I know, this never had a release outside those two compilations. Deason was a rising star at this time, in what was called The Third Wave Of Detroit Techno, and I snapped up whatever I could by him. When he was on, he was really on. This spaced out organ jam, a sleek Martian cousin to Paperclip People's Steam, was one of those moments.

  33. E-Dancer World Of Deep (KMS, 1997)

    34. I can now recall that there was a bit of a Detroit rally going on at this point. I was feeling good! This tune was actually featured on Saunderson's X-Mix that I mentioned above. It was hot off the presses at the time. Simply put, this is superb machine disco. Deeply psychedelic and absorbing, that bassline just takes hold. Are those synths or are they voices? You just have to close your eyes to this one.

  34. Virgo Ride (Radical, 1989)

    35. More dazzling tronik house moves, this time by way of Chicago. Machine rhythms and a cascading bassline suck you into the pitch black, while blurred vocals invite you to take a ride. This is night drive music for a ride to Club Silencio.

  35. Dark Energy Midnite Sunshine (Underground Resistance, 1994)

    36. This one from the awesome Dark Energy double-pack on UR. Credited to Dark Energy AKA Suburban Knight AKA James Pennington, and offering up a flipside to the paranoid dread in earlier records like The Art Of Stalking and Nocturbulous Behavior: anything is possible and the future is wide open. Inspiring stuff. There was a later Dark Energy record that was quite good as well, this time on an electrofunk tip.

  36. Reload Ehn (Infonet, 1993)

    37. Taken from A Collection Of Short Stories, which is (if I'm not mistaken) Global Communication's auspicious debut. The record is a grab-bag of disparate styles - from ambient to breakbeat techno and grinding industrial - complete with an equally disjunctured set of accompanying science fiction texts. This beauty in this track lies in its sheer inevitability as it works out its own internal logic - the synth's progression and that throbbing bassline, low-key breaks rolling beneath - its off-kilter funk running like illogical clockwork.

  37. Plaid Spudink (Warp, 1997)

    38. I've always been quite fond of this one. Its casual futurism is like viewing the Earth through a tiny portal from within the compact close quarters of the international space station... a tin can floating through the vastness of space. There's also loads of stuff by The Black Dog that I could/should have used in this list, but it must have slipped my mind.

  38. China Crisis Jean Walks In Freshfields (Virgin, 1982)

    39. This unlikely jewel of space music in miniature lies nestled at the end of China Crisis' debut album, Difficult Shapes & Passive Rhythms. It drops you into the shadow of a nebula and is over in the blink of an eye.

  39. Double Helix Low Key (Rush Hour, 2002)

    40. I think this one first appeared on the All Access To Detroit's Music Festivals compilation, but it later got a 12" release. A clockwork rhythm taps beneath a glowing bassline as the deepest of synths roll out into casual infinity. Strangely, this often makes me think of the spaciest precincts of China Crisis' discography (particularily Red Sails and The Soul Awakening).

  40. Kraftwerk Spacelab (Kling Klang, 1978)

    41. These gentlemen from Cologne don't have an album dedicated to space, possibly because they already said everything they needed to within the shining six minutes of Spacelab. Partially inspired by the machine disco rhythms of Giorgio Moroder, this sounds like ambient house before house even happened.

  41. Queen In The Space Capsule (Love Theme) (Elektra, 1981)

    42. When Dr. Zarkov's space capsule disconnects from the rocket, that guitar strum etches itself into infinity. Queen in soundtrack mode here, this is beautiful like Tangerine Dream. It's the love theme for Dale and Flash, one one level, but on another it seems to gesture toward a universal love for all of humanity (and thus makes it Dr. Zarkov's theme as much as anyone else's). Perfect music for getting sucked into a vortex, I once made an abstract hip hop track that sampled those opening synths.

  42. Mr. Fingers Stars (Jack Trax, 1987)

    43. Glorious early deep house from Larry Heard (a legend doncha know?). You've got this gently chugging beat, a bassline that wanders all over the spectrum and shimmering synth sequences that rotate in slow-motion lunar orbit, always threatening to slip just behind the beat but staying in perfect time. Exquisitely psychedelic.

  43. Dâm-Funk Keep Lookin' 2 The Sky (Stones Throw, 2009)

    44. Uptempo bizzness from the ever-reliable Dâm-Funk. Seeing him live made me realize that he's something like the West Coast equivalent to Moodymann: operating with the same vital foot in the present, informed by deep crates and a musical lineage stretching deep into the past (just swap out West Coast electro and Solar Records for deep disco slates and Motown). This is one of those moments when you realize that he's making, for all intents and purposes, techno.

  44. Mýa Mýa (Interscope, 1998)

    45. Produced by Darryl Pearson, cohort of DeVante Swing (mentor to Timbaland), and the sound's rubbed off in this fragile orbital torch song. I remember Simon Reynolds, back in the day, describing how midway through the song everything seemed to rotate on its axis. There's loads of great r&b moments that happen to be built on Art Of Noise/ZTT tunes (a list in itself there), and this must surely be among the greatest.

  45. DJ Mitsu The Beats Negative Ion (featuring Ainjoy McWhorter) (SA-RA Remix) (Planetgroove, 2004)

    46. SA-RA at their most deliriously decomposed (think Smokeless Highs and Hangin' By A String), but working with such lush source material that it manages to become a great pop moment in and of itself. Shamefully, I don't know anything about DJ Mitsu The Beats, as I only grabbed this remix EP after hearing it played out on their Dark Matter & Pornography Mixtape.

  46. SA-RA Creative Partners Hollywood (Redux) (Babygrande, 2007)

    47. And the men themselves for the grand finale. I can't overstate how epochal this crew have been in my own musical life, like something on the level of Led Zeppelin. They managed to tie together so many strands of music that I cherish and then took them supernova. This is zero gravity r&b, and a perfect end to this unplanned excursion into deep space music.