The Future Sound Of London Archives

FSOL – ISDN

Posted on May 7, 2018 @ 11:31pm by Coqui

The Future Sound Of London - ISDN (Limited Edition)

(Electronic Brain Violence: 1994)

Ever since first launching into this whole Terminal Vibration trip, I've wanted to touch down with ISDN. It's a strange, twisted record that seems to criss-cross the TV saga at so many points of intersection, with its off-kilter grooves clearly sourced in the warped avant funk of Episode V (What Time Is It?), the heavy atmospherics running parallel to the dubbed-out madness of Episode VI (Imperial Slates) and even its twisted beat matrix at a jagged interchange with the latest episode's (Edge Of No Control) descent into ragged abstract hip hop's shadowy precincts. Against all odds, at the midpoint of the 90s The Future Sound Of London — Brian Dougans and Gary Cobain — seemed to be channelling the ghosts of post punk past to augur bold new visions of the future.

In truth, it's not just ISDN that merits discussion within the context of Terminal Vibration. I could talk about everything that led up to it's protracted gestation, from the duo's earliest pre-FSOL releases at the cusp of the 80s and 90s — records like Stakker Humanoid, Chile Of The Bass Generation and The Pulse EPs — to their to their debut album as The Future Sound Of London — 1991's Accelerator — a post-rave paradise of shimmering breakbeat techno that culminated in increasingly abstract records like Amorphous Androgynous's Tales Of Ephidrina and the sweeping sonic vistas of 1994's Lifeforms.

The Future Sound Of London

I could also talk about everything that came in ISDN's wake, from the dystopian sonic environments of Dead Cities, My Kingdom and the electroid, post-hip hop sonix of the We Have Explosive EP (featuring appearances from Leon Mar and Kurtis Mantronik) to their cosmic swansong with Papua New Guinea Translations and The Mello Hippo Disco Show, after which they shifted gears into prog-inflected psychedelia (a path they've continued to walk for nearly twenty years now).

However, this is the point of inflection upon which everything else hinges: ISDN is the moment when The Future Sound Of London turned their attention away from the lustrous sonic utopias of Cascade and Lifeforms to focus on the seedy underbelly of their self-authored world, apparently lurking beneath the surface all along, in the grimy backstreets and dingy dives deep within the city. If Accelerator and the Earthbeat compilation might have soundtracked some prequel to William Gibson's Neuromancer, back when Case was still living large and his skills in high demand, then ISDN is the sound of the console cowboy down and out in Chiba City. This is where the cold machinery creeps in to inject its steely ugliness into the duo's sound, and things would never be the same...

FSOL ISDN

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

The year was 1994 and The Future Sound Of London were on top of the world. Flush from their contract with Virgin Records, who leapt to sign them in light of their ubiquitous dancefloor anthem Papua New Guinea, they'd managed to upgrade their studio from the lean-and-mean outpost where they cut their swathe of uncompromising 8-bit cyberpunk missives — released under names like Mental Cube, Smart Systems and Indo Tribe — to a state-of-the-art multimedia laboratory, decked out with video-editing capabilities featured prominently alongside the synths and sequencers.

They'd just unveiled their second FSOL full-length, Lifeforms, a sprawling double-album to critical acclaim and impressive sales. The remaining question (from the label and the public both) was, When is the tour? To which the duo replied Never!
with glee. Rather, their plan was to document a series of performances in the studio, transmitting live to various radio stations and venues via the recently implemented ISDN protocol across high speed lines with a combination of sonic and visual imagery.

Electricity

Radio quickly evolved as an area where people were inclined to use their ears.

These performances culminated in today's album (or albums, as ISDN came in two editions, released in quick succession). The first was the limited edition, enclosed in a jet-black gatefold sleeve with a velcro clasp(!), while the second was the wide release version housed in a simple white sleeve. For the first 2/3 of their running time, both versions are largely similar, but they diverge significantly in the final stretch, featuring three tracks completely unique to each release. For today's purposes, I've chosen to focus on ISDN Black, since it's the version more explicitly tied to the Terminal Vibration phenomenon (although I'll touch on the White tracks along the way as well). And so it begins...

Cityscape

People hadn't lost the ability to conjure atmospheres...

You're immediately dropped into the chaotic atmosphere of some crowded club, faceless and nameless, synths drifting aimlessly like a memory of the 1980s. Could you leave the lights alone please, exclaims an agitated voice, Stop flashing the fucking lights! Just A Fuckin' Idiot kicks into gear with a beat like puffs of dirty smoke and a release of hazy atmosphere into the room like something's just crept up behind you. Bleeps chirp on the beat as the sound of a whirring machine seems to rewind the beat every couple bars.

Along with a pervasive sense of claustrophobia, the sound of machinery and buzzing electronics is the great constant running through the heart of ISDN, giving it definite industrial vibes a million miles away from the bucolic, wide open spaces of Lifeforms. To top it all off, halfway into Idiot a spooked atmosphere overwhelms the room with an eerie synthetic choir crying out in a spectral falsetto somewhere between Morricone's OST vocals and the sound of a theremin.

On The Wall

It was 3 in the morning we were knackered, the last of the shops had closed hours ago.

Then a phone rings, with a shout (and without warning) and a boom sounding the sort of siren synth Vangelis unveiled on the Blade Runner OST, smearing across the soundscape in a great descending arc. A snatch of dialogue from Aliens intones, Alright, let's see what we can see. Everybody on-line, looking good. The heavy, unfunky beat of The Far Out Son Of Lung And The Ramblings Of A Madman drops in on a rolling, clipped loop (seemingly reloading from scratch every bar) while fake-sounding, detuned guitar stabs (sounding like something from a cheap, sample-playing keyboard circa 1990) punch into the mix at irregular intervals. Electric Miles Davis trumpets weave through the track like a serpent while outerspace/innerspace effects creep into every corner of the soundscape. It's a searing bad dream of a track, which was (perversely) the album's lone single.

Inevitably, it all dissolves into deep space sonix and the sounds of grinding machinery before releasing into the peaceful, gently rewinding atmosphere of Appendage. With synths pulsing beneath a gliding flute line and (what sound like) alien bird calls, it's a brief but welcome ambient respite after the intense opening gambit of Idiot and Madman. It lasts but for a moment, offering up a brief, lingering memory of Amorphous Androgynous' underwater calm before the tension comes back with a vengeance.

Metal

Then we submerged into 40 minutes of noizic - 50% Control 50% Chaos.

Slider cuts in without warning on a heavy slow-motion sci-fi big beat, rolling parallel to a flimsy metallic texture that echoes across the track, seeming to warp and bend in time to the rhythm. A grinding electronic loop sweeps in to take center stage, sounding like something wrenched from an old industrial record, before everything drops out to a wailing siren song and outer space noises soaring above it all like a drifting mirage. It's tracks like this that at the time had me thinking this was FSOL's trip hop album, with a warped vision of sleazy downbeat hip hop not so far removed from Depth Charge's contemporary output.

The beat changes up about 2/3 of the way through the track, slipping into an almost new jack swing robotic rhythm (albeit still played on that same ten ton drumkit), while sordid electronic squelches pulse into the darkness. This play of textures is even more so drawn from the trip hop playbook, leaving you wandering these sprawling catacombs in desperate search of a way out. At the last minute, it all drops out and you're unceremoniously jettisoned into a back alley interlude where a lonesome whistle duets with chirping cybernetic insects.

Vit

Millions of people being touched as remote units dotted and uncountable.

Then, the spaced-out sonix return once again, this time on a high tide on the sea of flesh, rolling in to bring you Smokin' Japanese Babe. A sultry slice of red light district downbeat jazz, it rides a languid rhythm carved out on shuffling brushed drums and woozy double bass, sounding very much like something from Maxinquaye's second side. Gently muted trumpets cry out lonesome in the night as a warped boogie synth puts in an unlikely spastik appearance toward the end.

It all goes spaced-out yet again, this time with the spooked sonix once more in full effect, before a loose electro rhythm shades into the mix alongside its requisite counterpart of whirring industrial machinery. You're Creeping Me Out conjures up images of claustrophobic films like Pi and Parallax View — films where paranoia practically takes the lead role — much like Photek's contemporary output circa Modus Operandi and The Hidden Camera EP. Eerie sounds seem to splash and echo in the darkness, while FSOL unfurl the sort of eldritch analogue synth figure that Boards Of Canada would later turn into a lifestyle.

It disintegrates into tones trailing off into the distance, birds seeming to return their electronic call, and suddenly you find yourself in an environment that wouldn't sound out of place on Lifeforms. However, you blink and it's but a fleeting memory echoing through the corridors of the city, and Eyes Pop - Skin Explodes - Everybody Dead soundtracks your current scenario. Ancient clockwork electronics fade in gently, sounding like harpsichords plucking out an elegy for the distant green worlds of Lifeforms, lost now for all time. A cascade of bleeps spill across the track and (what sounds like) uilleann pipes relay the melody one last time as it all sinks into the quicksand.

Dougans Temple

You know the way everyone's into weirdness right now?

It's My Mind That Works opens with a warped sample from the movie Repo Man (echoing the source of the previous track's title), before developing into a mournful piano piece foregrounded by industrial machinery and urban atmosphere. Suddenly, driving percussion creeps into the fray and a rude electronic synth arc blares into the darkness like one of those great MBV-esque synth flameouts from Hans Zimmer's score to Blade Runner 2049. It's so similar, in fact, that one wonders if Dougans and Cobain traveled to the present day and brought it back in time with them. After all, there's a reason they're called The Future Sound Of London.

Glyphs

Out of reverb into this lonely landscape of our own creation.

The piercing sounds of glass, as if played along the rim, announces Dirty Shadows (the title a great summation of this album's prevailing mood). Then, a creepy voice — first pitched up, then pitched down — repeats, come, fly the teeth of the wind... share my wings. Apparently, it's sampled from the sequel to The Exorcist. As if this album weren't spooky enough already! Thankfully, a gently shuffling rhythm breaks the silence and forms itself into another piece of swirling electronic jazz, this time recalling the drifting atmosphere of the sort of abstract jazz one might find on the ECM imprint. It's cinematic, like the Heat soundtrack, with plaintive pianos, Get Carter harpsichords and more of that ice cold machinery operating in the night.

Upon reflection, this seems like as good a prediction as any for the cosmic jazz stylings that seemed to emerge out of nowhere during the Papua New Guinea Translations project. All those allusions to Sun Ra and Alice Coltrane make perfect sense in light of tunes like Dirty Shadows and Smokin' Japanese Babe. This is a story that's told in even greater detail across the From The Archives series, which filled in the bits between the bits in what must be one of the more extensive bodies of unreleased work from the era (alongside the seemingly countless DATs left behind by Tupac Shakur).

Tired starts with more of that harpsichord — or is it mandolin? — before an industrial percussion loop tumbles into view. It all collapses into atmosphere, computer sounds and gentle waves of synth pulsing on the horizon. Against all odds, about halfway through it morphs into an idyllic piece of synth music, with rippling aquatic synths and the sort of pretty strings one might find in a Vangelis or mid-period Tangerine Dream OST. Finally, a flanged martial beat — like the one from Lifeforms' Vertical Pig — fades into view momentarily before being carried away on a solar wind.

Horizons

Tracks fusing with vomiting samplers all held together by a stoical Yage.

Cryptic voices and a lone exotic flute herald the arrival of Egypt, a singular bit of odyshape electro built on ancient reconstructed rhythm boxes, drums that sound hollow and a pinched reed sound mirroring the cracking snare. Synths bathe the tune in drifting serenity while ethereal, distant voices chant toward the sky. You can just picture rolling vistas stretching out beneath a sun-drenched horizon, drunk with the deep reds and violets of twilight. Hieroglyphs reanimate themselves and begin moving through the city, picking up from where they left off as if the passing centuries had only been but a fleeting pause. A magical moment, and surely one of this record's finest.

With Egypt's reeds detuned and descending in rapid-fire as they recede into the distance, we reach the point at which the two editions of ISDN diverge. Are They Fightin' Us creeps in on another riverbed of tranquillity, flutes and water sounds presaging a tentative rhythm built on wood bass and gentle percussion as a lone voice cries out in a distant scream. Like Dirty Shadows, it all seems to predict the cosmic jazz psychedelia of Translations (or even certain moments of The Isness). A more mechanical, industrialized beat takes the reigns for a spell before cycling onto a rolling breakbeat to carry the rhythm forward with even greater focus than before. Ultimately, the zero-gravity percussion returns to the fore on the returning high tide, wind chimes twinkling gently in the distance.

Gary Cobain

Everyone in the world is doing something without me.

A subtle bit of random electronic melody sneaks into the mix, the bug in the bassbin, and suddenly the warped post punk incantation of Hot Knives take us deep into leftfield. Riding chopped breaks and a clipped pan pipe figure — quite possibly the very same kit from Mental Cube's Chile Of The Bass Generation — it's an unexpected moment of skewed pop within this sea of atmosphere. There's even a heavily treated robotic vocal courtesy of Gary Cobain (if I'm not mistaken), marking it out as particularly unique in the FSOL canon (at least before the turn of the century rolls around). With muted horns and a warped chanting — drenched in atmosphere — contributing to its dense, murky mood, this is very much in the spirit of 23 Skidoo.

Indeed, more than any other, this tune really captures the mood of FSOL's BBC Radio 1 Essential Mix 2 (aka Fuct Up Soup), which featured 23 Skidoo alongside post punk stalwarts like A Certain Ratio, 400 Blows and the Cocteau Twins. Indeed, this is very reminiscent of A Certain Ratio's Kether Hot Knives (Mix In Special) (which featured prominently in the first leg of Fuct Up Soup). This tune is quintessential Terminal Vibration.

Coming on like a fusion of 23 Skidoo's heavy atmospheric hijinks and Thomas Leer's gaussian blurred new wave pop (with maybe even a dash of the Thompson Twins thrown in for good measure!), this is incredibly reminiscent of the 80s without being retro in the slightest. Rather, it seems haunted by the era. At times like this I'm reminded of Simple Minds' Veldt, which I've always sworn sounds just like ISDN-era FSOL. Without a doubt, Hot Knives is unquestionably a highlight of ISDN Black, re-framing it squarely as a post-post punk record.

Meadows

Calls back a time when there were meadows as far as the eye could see.

After fading out into some outer space sonix zapping through the machines, you get a solid minute plus of pure underwater atmosphere. Then, the treated guitars of guest auteur Robert Fripp (he of King Crimson, whose 80s records like Discipline and Beat I should have mentioned during the bonus round) enter the picture in the pastoral sound painting of the countryside that is A Study Of Six Guitars. Idyllic and blissfull, with just a hint of ECM jazz (think Pat Metheny's New Chautauqua). It makes you wonder if the lads were well into ECM at the time, which would have put them way ahead of the pack (recall that point about ten years ago when everyone was checking the label). This is actually the one song from the tail end of the album that makes it to both editions of ISDN.

The closing track, An End Of Sorts, wires a pounding electric rhythm to another of the album's rare bucolic impulses, bringing it all back home with a strong sense of anxiety. It actually reminds me of Tournesol's Draagmad Ultramarine, that same sense of illogical juxtaposition, a fusion of ethereal synths and aggressive slow-motion rhythm in a swirling portrait of unease. Like a giant question mark hanging over the proceedings, it's a fitting end to this enigmatic album that lies at the crossroads of the FSOL story.

...or, it could have happened this way (inverted)...

Statues

We knew they were lurking out there in ways too complex for stalwarts to imagine.

Egypt's reeds detuned and in rapid-fire, recede into the distance as a looping bassline — sounding like high tension power lines and seemingly built from a distorted kick drum — heralds the arrival of Kai. With its gravity-boot drums and soaring flutes competing in the mix with spaced-out atmospherics, its a big part of the reason why ISDN White feels like such a trip hop record. It's yet another track that seems to share common ground with Depth Charge, especially records like Sex, Sluts & Heaven (Bordello Mix) and Daughters Of Darkness.

Amoeba flows directly from the tail end of Kai, borrowing the the atmospheric drift of The Alan Parsons Project's Nucleus and pairing it with some Hawaiian slide guitar. Heavy brakes sounding as if they were recorded in a garage two blocks away roll into view, propelling the track through its surreal journey with no destination. A fascinating détente between Lifeforms and The Isness, it nevertheless manages to be quintessentially ISDN. It flows on a warm bed of sound into A Study Of Six Guitars, a tune which is more or less identical to its counterpart on ISDN Black, at least until it reaches its protracted conclusion and spills into a solid minute of space music (in the spirit of Steve Hillage's seminal Rainbow Dome Musick) before vanishing into another gentle spell of outer space sonix.

The Future Sound Of London

Something happened on Dollis Hill.

The loose downtempo breakbeat of Snake Hips kicks into the record's home stretch, introducing a smoker's favorite to wind up the proceedings. Tensile, plucked strings move up and down the scales precariously as a mutant bassline spars with the drums. Warped horns stab through the track like the guitars did in Son Of Lung — and sounding just as fake! — while the deep space effects return in full force. The downbeat swaps out for a tricky rhythm matrix nearly identical to the one Timbaland would unveil on Missy "Misdemeanor" Elliott's The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly) a few years later, and suddenly the track explodes into widescreen, going cinematic in a stunning crescendo that sounds like pure science-fiction. Like some dream studio session with SA-RA and Kevin Saunderson working up a vibe, it's pure machine soul. Only lasting a handful of bars, it rides out on a splash of cymbals and the sound of skyscraper guitars trilling majestic toward the heavens.

Polygons

He was gone and the transmission went on without him.

And then it's all over, you're dropped back to wherever you started. Back to the world. ISDN — whatever the version — is a true head trip of a record, and it's impossible to hear it without vivid imagery swirling through the mind in time to the music. Dougans and Cobain turned out to be right after all when they ventured in the liner notes that people hadn't lost the ability to conjure atmospheres. Without a doubt, it's definitely a record worth spending some serious time with.

Which version is better, you ask? That's a tough one. If you really pressed me to choose, I'd go with the easier-to-find ISDN White, for one because its the version I grew up with and therefore sounds more natural to my ears. Also, as a gentleman who walks the downbeat path, I'll always dig it the most as a trip hop record. Tunes like Kai and Snake Hips are absolutely killer slabs of abstract hip hop par excellence, bringing that unmistakable sense of warped FSOL magic to the form.

And yet I couldn't do without Hot Knives, which alongside Egypt and Snake Hips round out my trio of favorite tracks on the album. So I need them both, gravitating toward one or the other depending on where my headspace is at the time. When all is said and done, it's the unmistakable post punk flavor of ISDN Black that tips it into Terminal Vibrationterritory (and accordingly makes it the record of the month), and marks it out as a triumphant culmination of post punk's dancefloor diaspora. It's as if the experiments of 23 Skidoo, Material and The Pop Group were finally being picked up again, warped and twisted into strange new shapes, and projected deep into the heart of the future. After all, there's a reason they're called The Future Sound Of London.

…One More Thing

Posted on April 26, 2018 @ 11:03pm by Coqui

A couple thoughts occurred to me over the course of last week's endeavors, including the whole Island Disco post and the trio of concerts (especially the Jarre show) that I was lucky enough to attend. These were thoughts that I didn't get a chance to work into the other pieces, even if they may have been tangentially relevant, so I figured that I'd collect them all here. Well, here goes...

A couple dear cousins of mine, both a good deal younger than I, sometimes ask me to paint a picture of the nineties. Break it down, so to speak. Drop some science. I'm always more than happy to do so, as I have a fundamental fondness for the era. Not even so much fond memories of particular events or happenings, but an affinity with the general vibe of the era. Anything was possible. The future was up for grabs! Dance music was on the ascendant, reaching ever new heights of innovation by the week, it seemed. It was like rock's sixties and seventies all rolled into one. There were hard times to be sure - that's just something you can't escape, no matter the era - but the general tenor was one that kept you hopeful that tomorrow was gonna be a brighter day.

I'm well on record as an aficionado of the nineties, and yet the 80s might have had an even greater impact on me. First off, I was younger. Secondly, I hadn't yet experience the symptoms of depression that would rear their ugly head increasingly as the decade wore on. But really, and I remember this vividly, circa 1989 there was this sense that the table had already been set for the decade to come. Something like Big Audio Dynamite's Free and the film Flashback make the point I'm trying to here (Once we get out of the 80s, the 90s are gonna make the 60s look like the 50s). I can think of no greater evidence of this than the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, and the elation that resulted (with dance music providing a suitable backdrop for the era, Love Parade, etc.).

This is the era that most of these thoughts I've collated spring from, loosely put the years 1986-1992. Period markers include hip hop's rise to dominance as a genre, house and techno on the ascendant as well, ragga in the charts, sampladelia coming into its own as the artform of the era, the Second Summer Of Love, big shades, t-shirts and day-glo colors everywhere, all with the darkness of Seattle grunge and the Wu-Tang Clan still a ways away from cracking the mainstream. If forced to narrow it down to a distint season, I'd peg it for me at summer vacation following second grade. That is, summer 1989.

Take a look, it's in a book.

Still a kid at the time, I remember this era through the lens of phenomena like Reading Rainbow, Levar Burton's PBS television show where he'd delve into some topic - oftentimes in some far off corner of the world (one episode on Japan stands out distinctly in my memory) - all while encouraging reading among the youth. This of course overlapping with his time on the USS Enterprise D as Geordi La Forge on Star Trek: The Next Generation. Yes, the man was on a roll.

Can it get any more Parallax Pier?!

I remember a distinct trend in music of the era - not only on the radio but also in movies and television shows - taking on a decidedly tropical flavor. Suddenly it seemed as if marimbas were everywhere! Even Quentin Tarantino/Tony Scott's True Romance featured them front-and-center during the more lighthearted scenes. I've been at great pains to point out the ways it colored the dancefloors of the era, but its presence could definitely be felt in the wider culture. I'm talking about Bobby McFerrin's Don't Worry Be Happy, Jimmy Cliff's cover version of I Can See Clearly Now and of course Inner Circle's Bad Boys (AKA the theme from COPS!). It doesn't get much more central than that, does it?

Maxi Priest Close To You

This when the likes of Shabba Ranks and Maxi Priest were tearing up the charts, also figures like UB40 and Snow giving it all a pop spin. This might be the strongest direct presence Jamaica has ever had in pop culture, more so even than the new wave era during Bob Marley's reign. Of course it was all hoovered up by rap and rave culture, popping up in all sorts of places from Dr. Dre's West Coast hip hop to The Prodigy's dazzling, candy-coated ardkore. Even rock had its dalliance with the stuff in the form of 311, Sublime and a thousand third-wave ska bands! And who could forget Common Sense's Never Give Up?

Bobby Konders "All The Massive Hits" In A Rub A Dub Stylee

For our purposes, this manifests itself most particularly in the whole Nu Groove aesthetic, especially in the output of one Bobby Konders. Records like She Say Kuff, Ruff & Massive and House Rhythms offer up a near-perfect fusion of deep house and digital reggae, sometimes even featuring dancehall figures like Mikey Jarrett and Maxi Culture on the mic. And look no further than the sleeves to Bobby Konders & Massive Sounds and "All The Massive Hits" In A Rub A Dub Stylee for a perfect visual image of this whole trip.

Bobby Konders & Massive Sounds

There was a greater awareness of the environment at the time, which ties in with Jarre's Oxygene in ways that I'd forgotten. Did you know that it was originally an opus dedicated to the sanctity of planet Earth and a paean to its preservation? That was a thread running through the era, a notion that had become important in the aftermath of the 1960s but in truth dates back to grizzled adventurers like John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt realizing that America's wilderness was something quite special and undoubtedly worth preserving.

Jean Michel-Jarre Oxygene

Famously, Richard Nixon established the EPA during his administration. This when films like Silent Running and Soylent Green hammered the point home in celluloid, films that would have a profound impact on the era's psyche. By the dawn of the compact disc era, environmental recordings, sounds of the rainforest, ocean waves, sounds of the bayou were everywhere: suddenly you could set up a whole sonic environment in your living room. Get carried away on rainclouds (or ocean waves!). You can hear this all over peak-era electronic music like FSOL's Lifeforms, The KLF's Chill Out and countless Orb remixes (Auntie Aubrey's Excursions Beyond The Call Of Duty is full of found environmental sounds).

Okapi Vibin' Out At The San Diego Zoo

This all dovetails with the sheer wonder I can still recall as a youth of having a yearly pass to the San Diego Zoo, seeing animals from across the globe and placing them within the context of the world's geography that I was picking up along the way (with the attendant flags and captitals, naturally!). It seemed that these formerly exotic realms were very much front and center at this point, places like the Serengeti, the Amazon and most of all Australia's outback were the focus of documentaries and more. The Discovery Channel really started to make itself felt as a presence around this time, and I remember spending hours watching coverage of these far flung locales.

The Sydney Opera House: Now that's a pier!

I've often wondered why Australia in particular managed to so thoroughly capture the world's imagination at this point. It seemed to have this cachet of the exotic, romantic and futuristic. The sound of didgeridoo was everywhere. Was it the vanguard cinema of Peter Weir (Picnic At Hanging Rock, The Big Wave... Gallipoli even featured some Jarre in it's soundtrack) and George Miller (Mad Max, The Road Warrior, et. al.) making a splash, or impressive feats of architecture like the Sydney Opera House becoming lodged in the international consciousness as a modern wonder of the world? My brother lays it all at the feet of Paul Hogan. And yes, the Crocodile Dundee films were a bonafide phenomenon at the time, and they did spend a satisfying amount of time in the outback. At any rate, I remember that featuring a narrator with an Australian accent in your documentary was the golden touch at the time, signalling that elusive combination of frontiersman and futurist.

That's certainly one way to get to Mexico!

I defer to the films that Disney put out around this time: The Rescuers Down Under, The Lion King, The Little Mermaid, Cool Runnings and Aladdin. Also globe-trotting films like Club Paradise, Romancing The Stone and Jewel Of The Nile and the Indiana Jones trilogy. O.C. And Stiggs with their King Sunny Adé obsessions and inner tube pilgrimage down to Mexico, not to mention their high-rolling, exotica-crazed pal Coletti (Martin Mull in a brilliant cameo turn) took this spirit into the mundane suburbs of Arizona (often reminding me of a certain crew in the greater San Diego area circa 1997). Look no further than the soundtrack to Disney's The Little Mermaid (along with Cool Runnings, the storied film about Jamaica's first bobsled team) for evidence of the level to which it all penetrated the mainstream.

Geoffrey Oryema Beat The Border

Think also of Peter Gabriel's records around this time, things like Security up to and including Us, and the whole Real World set up, bringing music from around the world to the Western stereo (usually glossed up with some period production flourishes). Speaking of the big time, you also had Paul Simon's Graceland, recorded with Ladysmith Black Mambazo and Los Lobos, a righteous flirtation with African music and zydeco (in the comics, O.C. And Stiggs were obsessed with Clifton Chenier). Vampire Weekend are still riding that wave. Then there's that one song (Help Me Somebody) on My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts that I could swear has a distinct zydeco flavor.

Yep, I know that feelin'.

The Talking Heads went down this path after their whole Compass Point era had run its course, with David Byrne even directing a film (True Stories) about small town life. See also Paris, Texas and Ry Cooder's gorgeous slide guitar soundtrack to that film. This sound was sort of the era's go-to for signifying rootsiness at the time, shades of which filtered into Angelo Badalamenti's sountracks to David Lynch' films (especially Twin Peaks). Think of all that heavily reverbed, languidly played rockabilly (Chris Isaak's Wicked Game) that fit Lynch's distinctly American Gothic, neo-noir moves like a glove.

The Mission District

As I mentioned before, the summer following second grade: that was quintessentially this. I remember taking a trip up to the Bay Area with my family for an uncle's wedding, a trip that extended to include a greater tour of Northern California. We checked out Lassen Volcanic National Park - memories of the lava tubes, hot springs and Mt. Harkness, seemingly covered entirely in grasshoppers - and Mount Shasta, the Redwood Forest and back to San Francisco and Monterey. In retrospect, there was an interesting mix going on up there, a melting pot of post-new wave gen x college kids, faded hippies, club kids, yuppies and bohemian types that was quite fascinating. To this this day it's stayed with me, a pungently evocative atmosphere. San Louis Obispo was pretty far out, anyway. We didn't get a chance to check out the aquariums in Monterey though (it was far too crowded).

Whales... humpback whales, Mr. Scott.

Which was a shame, although I always meant to go back and check it out. A shame - not that I'm complaining - because the ocean is the final element in today's list of items. Some post-Jacques Coustou bizzness. Whale song recordings were very hip at the time (see Sinéad O'Connor's Jerusalem, Open House' Aquatic and once again, The Orb). Then of course there was Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, featuring a story involving time travel, San Francisco and humpback whales. Oceanic.

Arthur Russell In The Corn Belt

If there's one figure where I'd point and exclaim there!, then it's Arthur Russell. He makes this point quite beautifully. You can just hear it in records like Let's Go Swimming, In The Light Of The Miracle and Lola's Wax The Van. At any rate, I always thought it wax an appropriate touch making the sleeve to The World Of Arthur Russell the bottom of a swimming pool. His was a true Ocean Of Sound music.

The World Of Arthur Russell

The signifiers are almost too many to count. First of all there's the alias Indian Ocean that he used for the phenomenally abstract, fractal-winding post-disco of the School Bell/Treehouse record (bringing to mind both the aircraft carrier scenes from Top Gun - set in the Indian Ocean, remember, and tangentially Tony Humphries' Zanzibar club). The Paradise Garage too, Larry Levan's domain. Then of course there's the labels on the early Sleeping Bag releases, the era when Russell had the greatest influence, featuring a stylized Koala.

Indian Ocean School Bell/Treehouse

Another of Russell's aliases, used for production, was Killer Whale. Though there was never a record released under the name - such a shame! - it crops up on the Clandestine record, Loose Joints' Tell You (Today) and of course Let's Go Swimming. It's all very much emblematic of all subjects covered here today, showcasing that sense of the whole world being at your fingertips (a sense that would culminate in the world wide web). Everything suddenly felt very futuristic.

At any rate, I think the freshness of all this music - the Compass Point material, Nu Groove sides, Night Dubbin' - speaks to the era still having a quite strong charge about it. It has certainly stayed with me through the years...

Jarre Beyond The Clouds

Posted on April 23, 2018 @ 9:51pm by Coqui

Jean-Michel Jarre Live @ Spreckels Theatre

Jean-Michel Jarre live at Spreckels Theater (4/21/2018).

Saturday night, Snakes and I caught Jean-Michel Jarre at the Spreckels Theatre. Being the kind-hearted mensch that he is, Snakes hooked a brother up with a ticket to the show. We and Jarre go way back. It all started back in our school daze, when I was deep in the studio laying down what would become the b-side to Galaxies, Red Planet. On hearing the song, my wise uncle James remarked that it reminded him of Jarre's music. I had never heard of the man, and so he explained that he was one of the original electronic artists to make a big splash back in the day.

Fast-forward a few months to the following Christmas. On opening a gift from this very same uncle (with the tell-tale 5"x5½" dimensions), I was confronted with the Images compilation of Jarre's work. And thus opened up a whole new world of seventies electronica to my ears. As was often the case, Snakes and I would vibe out to the disc in the studio or cruising around town. Ultimately, word spread and eventually a tiny, informal Jean-Michel Jarre appreciation society seemed to spring up nearly overnight in the greater Allied Gardens/Grantville area. Ok, so it was just a handful of mates, but still...

Fast-forward twenty years spent with the man's music - the both of us acquiring various records like Oxygene and Equinoxe on multiple formats, spinning them out from time to time, plus descending further into the world of early electronic music with every passing year - and we're walking into the Spreckels Theatre to see Jean-Michel Jarre live and in person. It quickly became apparent that there was a sizeable presence of French ex-pats in attendance, while the age range of the crowd was pretty diverse. I'd guess we were somewhere in the middle.

Marco Grenier Works The Machines

Marco Grenier works the machines.

With little fanfare, the opening DJ strode out to set the stage with a sprawling set of cinematic electronica. Picture a hybrid of both Blade Runner OSTs, and that'll give you a decent idea of how it all began, with downtempo industrial beats entering the picture after the sweeping overture slowly gained steam. There was one track that reminded us of Daft Punk's score for Tron: Legacy before the set ultimately eased into a grinding midtempo stomp (think Fluke's Zion from the second Matrix film). There was even one song that sounded like a dead ringer for The Dream-era Kevin Saunderson.

Once the set had concluded, the lights came on for about twenty minutes. It was a stunning set, but no announcement was made of his name until Jarre called it out at the end of the evening (but we didn't catch it at the time!). Thankfully, Snakes did a bit of digging and discovered that the DJ in question was Marco Grenier. Mystery solved! Definitely worth investigating further. We were still reeling from it all when, after a brief wait, the lights dimmed again and show was ready to begin...

The Show Begins

The show begins...

With a wild slab of synth noise cutting through the theatre from behind a translucent screen, the first portentous chords of the evening set the clockwork wheels in motion. Suddenly, the screen opened like a doorway to reveal vector door after vector door, revealing Jarre atop a platform center stage, ensconced within his machines. As Jarre conjured massive sounds from his vast array of synthesizers, he was matched by equally dazzling visuals in an remarkable multimedia spectacle. Accordingly, since we were seated for most of the show with no one sitting behind us, I snapped far more pictures than I usually would.

Lost In The Hall Of Mirrors

Lost in the hall of mirrors.

For the entirety of the show, Jarre was flanked by a drummer on his left and another synthesist on his right (actually, they both were manning myriad instruments at various points), bolstering the sound into more muscular groove than one might expect (shades of François Kevorkian drumming against Walter Gibbons' marathon DJ sets at Galaxy 21).

Jarre: Synthesizer King

It dawned on me about fifteen minutes in - and I can't believe it hadn't earlier - that Jarre's music exists not only in the continuum of seventies space music (with Oxygene a quintessential head elpee), but also served as a perfect complement to some of the more propulsive dancefloor moves of contemporary electronic denizens like Patrick Cowley and Giorgio Moroder in much the same way The Orb and The Future Sound Of London would have with the likes of Orbital and Joey Beltram. With Kraftwerk fitting into this equation roughly the same way Detroit does (but of course!).

Jarre Don't Play

Jarre don't play!

Suddenly, mid-show there was an unexpected shift into almost Wax Trax!-style industrial/EBM music. One tune made me flash on Front Line Assembly's The Blade (it took everything in me not to start repeating stick 'em up muthafucka, this is a hold up!). There was even a collaboration with Edward Snowden titled Exit (apparently from the recent Electronica 2 album), a pounding paranoid thriller of a track that tackled the subject of privacy (and the fight for the right to keep it).

Snowden himself even appeared onscreen to give a brief speech mid-song before being sampled to bits during the track's x-ray denouement. It was all very much of the spirit of Cabaret Voltaire's intense interrogations of surveillance and control. Thanks to Snakes for providing the above photo... I was so mesmerized by this sequence that I forgot to snap a picture!

Jarre: Guitar Hero?!?

Jarre... Guitar Hero?!?

The big surprise came at the end of the extended sequence, when Jarre himself strapped on a guitar to add some rugged crunch to the track's climax. Yeah, that was pretty cool.

Oxygene

Oxygene!?! More like Toxygene!

Of course various portions of Jarre's flagship piece, Oxygene were peppered throughout the marathon performance. The first to feature was the stratospheric drift of Oxygene 2, which coming face to face with in a live context drove home the fact that it's very much of a piece with someone like Daniele Baldelli's cosmic visions. I've always loved the way his loping rhythms aren't remotely like anyone else's (and the remain an obvious precursor to ambient house).

Oxygene 4 - perhaps the man's most widely known moment - featured as well, during which people were dancing in the aisles (one woman was doing some very spaced-out dancing - not unlike Keith Flint's car surfing during The Prodigy's Out Of Space music video. The Oxygene 8 (from the 90s-era Oxygene 7-13 record, a sequel of sorts) which I remember fit quite well with some of the more pastoral corners of trance that were happening at the time). I was reminded of Dr. Alex Paterson's remix of the track, which after thorough rejection from Jarre himself, he wound up releasing as The Orb's Toxygene. That was pretty funny.

Jarre Plays The Lights

Jarre plays the lasers.

At one point, Jarre - ever the showman - played a series of lasers fanning out toward the ceiling. Every time his hand would break the stream of the laser, a bass note would ring through the theatre. Depending on which stream he touched, a different note would sound off. Inevitably, the sequence grew increasingly complex until the man was doling out notes in rapid succession. If I'm not mistaken, this has been a hallmark of his stage show for some time.

Jarre vs. Pet Shop Boys

Neil Tennant derezzed!

Another surprise (in an evening full of them) was a track that Jarre had recently recorded with the Pet Shop Boys, featuring twenty foot tall digital recreations of Neil Tennant singing to the rafters. A melancholy synth pop epic, it was without a doubt one of the evening's highlights. The visual effect was pretty trippy too.

Feel The Mood

Feel the mood.

One thing that quickly became evident was how comfortable Jarre had become with the pulsing grooves of dance music, indeed much of the night's music was taken from his recent two Electronica albums. I must admit that I hadn't kept up with the man's more recent music, but after hearing a considerable selection of what he's been up to in the ensuing years, it's painfully apparent that further investigation is essential (along with the Pet Shop Boys and Snowden, Electronica 2 also features collaborations with Jeff Mills, Primal Scream, The Orb, Sébastien Tellier, Yello and Cyndi Lauper!).

Dancers In Motion

There was one sequence involving stylized dancers that was particularily memorable. Segments that I missed documenting included spooky performances of Equinoxe 4 and Equinoxe 7, featuring rows of parallaxing binocular people from the album's sleeve. At one point, I could swear a giant alien grey appeared in the middle of the screen, and there was also a return of the figures holding up their cellphone cameras in lieu of eyeglasses!

Jarre was a gracious host, descending a staircase to interact with the audience fairly often, which was a pleasant surprise. Towards the end of the performance, he even gave shout outs to his backing musicians along with the opening act. It was rather fitting for a man who's always made electronic music with an unmistakably human core. Seeing him in person was in something I never thought I'd get to experience, and it exceeded my expectations in every way. As the crowd poured out of the theater and into the streets, Snakes and I headed down to catch a ride home, discussing the night's music like we had a thousand times before. And suddenly, it was as if we were teenagers again...

Terminal Vibration: Bonus Round (Island Disco)

Posted on April 19, 2018 @ 11:45pm by Coqui

Picking up where we left off with the last chapter (Imperial Slates) and in light of the recent Parkway Bowl Disco Mix, it's as good a time as any to touch on a key element in the Terminal Vibration blueprint that doesn't fit anywhere else in the schema. Consider this a cool breeze of an interlude between last episode's heavy dub shapes and next week's hip hop brakes. At the interzone between post-disco, new wave and boogie, there lies a sound that runs like a thread through the 80s (and beyond). This sound is encapsulated up by no one quite as much as (you guessed it) the Compass Point All Stars.

The crucial ingredient that sets this sound apart from what everything that came before is the thorough absorption of dub reggae's sonic toolkit into dance music's fabric. One can hear the reverberations echo through the ensuing years, most obviously in the spangly textures within the music of house figures like Bobby Konders (and by extension much of Nu Groove's output), Larry Heard and Tony Addis' Warriors Dance setup. The thread then gets picked up by the likes of The Future Sound Of London (the earlier material in particular, see Accelerator, The Pulse EPs and the Earthbeat compilation), The Orb (Perpetual Dawn, Blue Room, Toxygene, et. al.) and even progressive figures like Leftfield and Andrew Weatherall.¹

Tangentially, large swathes of trip hop - Massive Attack, Smith & Mighty, Bomb The Bass and loads more - seem to flow naturally from the more downbeat corners of Grace Jones' (I've Seen That Face Before (Libertango), for instance) and Wally Badarou's (literally, in the case of Mambo) discography. And like trip hop, this is a territory that I only mean to touch on briefly in the context of the Terminal Vibration series, as I plan to spend a much more time in this region in the not-too-distant future, with a feature of its own. Like I said, this is just an interlude of sorts.

This sound - which I'm still rooting around for a good, concise name for - was a key part of the story of what went down sonically at the Paradise Garage. Larry Levan's production on Gwen Guthrie's Padlock mini-album epitomizes the sound, in which deep grooving bass, spangly synthetic textures, dubbed-out percussion and disembodies vocals all coalesce in a swirling headphone symphony. This is a four-dimensional, tactile approach to sound design that pulses through the era like a homing beacon, bringing all manner of disparate figures into the fold as the decade rolls on like the pied piper.

As I was saying before, the key crew in all of this was the Compass Point All Stars, who cooked up something quite special down in Nassau on a series of records for artists like Grace Jones, Gwen Guthrie and the Tom Tom Club. Island disco, Parallax Pier, coastal dub... whatever you call it, it's very much a sound all its own. It's interesting to note - and I've mentioned this before - the way Caribbean transplants Grace Jones, Eddy Grant and Billy Ocean all seem to have put in early work hammering this sound out in isolation over the course of the prior decade, their unique geographic perspective informing the music they were making within the context of what was the by-and-large straight up disco community.

Then there's the whole new-wave-gone-to-the-tropics phenomenon that probably started with the Talking Heads' I Zimbra and Remain In Light (who were coming at it from a West African-informed trajectory), and The English Beat's shimmering Caribbean inflections. I'm talking about Burning Sensations' Belly Of The Whale, Haircut One Hundred's Pelican West and XTC's It's Nearly Africa, not to mention David Byrne's production for The B-52's Mesopotamia mini-album (the influence of which seemed to stick around through their third album, Whammy!, even informing certain corners of their Cosmic Thing comeback in 1989).

The whole thing wraps around to the extent that the Talking Heads seem to be influenced by the groups that they influenced themselves (along with the Tom Tom Club's records), going full-on tropical with Speaking In Tongues, which was actually recorded at Compass Point. It's a sound not unlike what Kid Creole And The Coconuts had been up too, a sound that was co-opted and given a dark twist by Jerry Dammers on The Special AKA's In The Studio. Interesting that many of the ska bands ended up shearing into this territory, with English Beat songs like Ackee 123 seeming to split the difference between calypso and township jive.

One doesn't need to search far to find the real-deal flipside to these island incursions in the honest-to-goodness Jamaican disco like Crashers' Flight To Jamaica (Cool Runings) and Third World's Now That We Found Love (which despite hailing from 1978 sounds like something from, oh about 1993), while music coming out of Africa like Juju Music by King Sunny Adé & His African Beats and Tony Allen's Afrobeat 2000 squared the circle between new wave post-disco and their Yoruba/afrobeat roots. Once again, the circular logic is in evidence throughout, with the original influence being touched in turn by the music they'd originally influenced. And on and on and on.

And let's not forget Thomas Leer's globetrotting, sun-warped new pop, records like 4 Movements and Contradictions where he perfectly captures that Mediterranean drift between Tangier, Cairo and Ibiza (and often makes me flash on The Jewel Of The Nile!). There's also Suicide's second album, the glistening, mirage-like synths of which - coupled with Ric Ocasek's ace production - which always struck me as an almost unexpected detour into such sun-kissed terrain.

In many ways, I've often thought that records like Dream Baby Dream and Suicide: Alan Vega · Martin Rev run parallel to certain Arthur Russell records like Let's Go Swimming, In The Light Of The Miracle, Lola's Wax The Van and Dinosaur L's In The Corn Belt. Indeed, large swathes of the Sleeping Bag catalog sit quite comfortably in this vein, as does much of the early Easy Street output. Even European dance music like My Mine's Hypnotic Tango's and Yello's exotica-tinged sides seem to fit into this puzzle with ease. To reiterate, the currents of this music seem to run through the very fabric of the era's dancefloors... but that's another story for another day, and I've already gone on far too long tonight.

1. One of the great musical epiphanies of mine a few years back was realizing that Leftfield were merely picking up where Bobby Konders and No Smoke left off.

LISTEN NOW

TV6 Imperial Slates

The English Beat Too Nice To Talk To (Go-Feet)
Thomas Leer Hear What I Say (Cherry Red)
Gwen Guthrie Seventh Heaven (Garage/Island Trading Co.)
The Orb Perpetual Dawn (Solar Youth Mix) (Big Life)
Talking Heads This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody) (Sire)
XTC It's Nearly Africa (Virgin)
King Sunny Adé & His African Beats Ma Jaiye Oni (Mango)
Yello La Habanera (Carl Craig's Hands On Yello) (Urban)
The Special AKA Bright Lights (Two-Tone)
Kid Creole And The Coconuts Table Manners (ZE)
Tom Tom Club Genius Of Love (Island)
Eddy Grant Living On The Frontline/The Frontline Symphony (ICE)
Tony Allen with Afrobeat 2000 When One Road Close (Another One Go Open) (Wrasse)
Suicide Diamonds, Fur Coat, Champagne (Antilles)
The Future Sound Of London While Others Cry (Jumpin' & Pumpin')
Grace Jones I've Seen That Face Before (Libertango) (Island)
Massive Attack Daydreaming (featuring Tricky & Shara Nelson) (Wild Bunch)
Dub Poets Black & White (Massive B)
Bomb The Bass Sandcastles (featuring Bernard Fowler) (4th & Broadway)
Arthur Russell In The Light Of The Miracle (Talkin' Loud)

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

The Parallax Sound Lab New York City Intro

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

The Mike Theodore Orchestra Moon Trek (Westbound)

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.

The Clash The Magnificent Seven (CBS)

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.

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

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!

Martin Circus Disco Circus (Prelude)

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.

Kurtis Blow The Breaks (Merucry)

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.

Bruce Johnston Pipeline (Columbia)

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.

Odyssey Inside Out (RCA Victor)

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.

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

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.

Eddy Grant Walking On Sunshine (ICE)

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!

Billy Ocean Stay The Night (GTO)

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.

Ian Dury Spasticus (Autisticus) (Polydor)

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 interview ¹ with old Ian (who in his youth suffered from polio), talking about the story behind the song.

Grace Jones Pull Up To The Bumper (Island)

Yet more peak-period Compass Point (perhaps the peak, in this case) with Miss Grace Jones in the driver seat. The video ² 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.

Delegation You And I (Ariola)

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.

The Whispers And The Beat Goes On (Solar)

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.

My Mine Hypnotic Tango (Progress Record)

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.

Giorgio Moroder Palm Springs Drive (Polydor)

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.

Ashford & Simpson One More Try (Warner Bros.)

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.

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

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.

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

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.

GQ Disco Nights (Rock Freak) (Arista)

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.

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

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.

Kano I'm Ready (Emergency)

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.

Kebekelektrik War Dance (Les Disques Direction)

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.

Donna Summer I Feel Love (Casablanca)

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.

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

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.

Terminal Vibration VI (Imperial Slates)

Posted on March 19, 2018 @ 10:54pm by Coqui

And so we cross the threshold into the 90s, where the aftershocks of dubbed out post punk were continuing to live large. This was the context through which I linked up with the music in the first place, working my way back from the nascent sounds of trip hop's bricolage and the heavy atmospheric techno seeping in from all corners of the globe. In what must be a rather atypical entry into the music, I'd initially become aware of various post punk figures by way of their dalliance with nineties dance and accordingly began exploring their own music in earnest.

Right off the bat, Mark Stewart was the strange attractor of the Bristol scene, rubbing shoulders with the trip hop trinity of The Wild Bunch/Massive Attack crew, giving Tricky the impetus to strike out solo (with the epochal Aftermath, which Stewart co-produced) and Smith & Mighty, who turned in their first remix for Stewart's Stranger Than Love. That's quite clearly a profound influence on the Bristol blues and accordingly sent me both back in time, to Stewart's 1987 self-titled LP, and latterly to his 90s records Metatron and Control Data which were of a piece with contemporary outfits like Meat Beat Manifesto and Renegade Soundwave.

Meat Beat Manifesto split the difference between post-industrial noise and post-Bomb Squad hard-edged hip hop, shot through with a healthy dose of dub's bottom end, the combination of which found Jack Dangers' crew essentially creating the template for the big beat of The Chemical Brothers. They're actually poised right at the edge of this chapter and the next (which will trace the contours of hip hop beats as the decade turns), so they will be covered further next time out, but it's important to note the bass-heavy vibes of Radio Babylon within the context of dub and related capers taking center stage today.

Similarly, Renegade Soundwave slotted in quite naturally to the post punk drift, where they rode that third rail between dub, hip hop and a skeletal, stripped-down take on cut-and-paste indie dance. After taking Britain's dancefloors by storm with rude 12"s like The Phantom and Ozone Breakdown, largely defining the interzone between electro's rhythm matrix and big beat's rolling breaks. RSW's debut album, Soundclash, rocked the dancehall with heavy beats and dub's bottom end backing Gary Asquith's wiseguy microphone antics, while In Dub largely eschewed vocals altogether in favor of atmosphere. A couple years later, Leftfield remixed the crew's eponymous Renegade Soundwave 12" into a 4/4 slab of stomping tronik house magic.

Leftfield themselves offered another conduit back into post punk with John Lydon's vocal spot on Open Up, which sent me back to Metal Box and sideways to Lydon's contemporary solo bid Psycho's Path (which happened to feature remixes from Leftfield and The Chemical Brothers). Leftfield's two 90s LPs boasted their own moments of dubbed out magic: Leftism boasted a cinematic, widescreen sound that touched down with shimmering techno, pounding house missives and occasionally ducked into trip hop, while Rhythm And Stealth stripped it all back to hard-edged electroid grooves and smoked-out isolationism. The latter especially works remarkably well alongside the likes of Bandulu (on one hand) and 23 Skidoo (on the other).

23 Skidoo took an interesting turn themselves in the 90s, opening up their Ronin imprint and putting out UK rap records by Roots Manuva, Deckwrecka and Rodney P. even as they amassed a huge back catalogue of unreleased material (which was eventually collected on the deluxe edition of the Just Like Everybody compilation). The group's self-titled LP released at the turn of the century was a mini-paradise of rolling breakbeats and moody downbeat that seemed to square the circle between their brand of atmospheric post punk and trip hop.

And yet if there was one group that seemed to hallucinate trip hop years before it seeped out of Bristol, it was Colourbox, whose Baby I Love You So took Jacob Miller's lovers rock staple and twisted it into a steely-edged, Escape From New York-sampling dread torch song that came on like something from Tricky 's Pre-Millenium Tension. However, the flipside was another matter altogether, with Morricone's spaghetti western vibes writ large on Looks Like We're Shy One Horse/Shoot Out's discomix showcase which glided on a motorik 4/4 pulse before collapsing into a downbeat-the-dub-ruler conclusion.

Incidentally, I discovered a lot of this music through The Future Sound Of London's Radio 1 Essential Mix 2 (from 6/3/95), which seemed to source ISDN's weird, twisted trip hop in the dread post punk of 400 Blows, Fats Comet, 23 Skidoo, Cabaret Voltaire and A Certain Ratio. That mix really opened up a whole world of music beyond what I'd previously been exposed to, even betraying the first rumblings of the duo's fascination with sixties psychedelia. Their Dead Cities swan-song - along with its surrounding singles - was also very much of a piece with this post punk terrain as well, continuing where the likes of 23 Skidoo and Cabaret Voltaire left off.

On a similar note, Andrew Weatherall offered up another crucial incursion a couple years later with his Nine O'Clock Drop compilation, which happened to overlap with FSOL's Essential Mix in spirit, with the added bonus of the aforementioned Colourbox b-side. That compilation managed to beat the post punk gold rush to the punch by a few years, enshrining a whole brace of great late-period avant funk shearing into electro in one essential package (for the uninitiated, at least). Weatherall's own music always had a bit of post punk flavor just beneath the surface, especially on The Sabres Of Paradise's Haunted Dancehall and much of Two Lone Swordsmen's output. With the Swordsmen ultimately morphing into a full-fledged post punk band with 2004's From The Double Gone Chapel, well, it certainly stacks up.

Another group that made a similar transition into full-fledged songforms was Bandulu, who started out dealing in tough, cinematic techno missives before gradually stripping layer after layer away to reveal a skeletal, metallic, dubbed out blueprint of street-level techno before ultimately winding up with their masterstroke Redemption (which featured honest-to-goodness reggae cuts like Detention and Jahquarius). There was also that whole side of the group's output that delved into downbeat electro-dub like Deep Sea Angler, Agent Jah and Chapter 6, very much of a piece with contemporary digidub. Chapter 6 in particular finds the group shearing insouciantly into proto-dubstep territory.

Many miles away Basic Channel synthesized an elegant, spacious systems music that was something like the kosmische flipside to Bandulu's tuff minimal techno. Basic Channel's run of 12"s seemed to seep into dance music's consciousness quite gradually as the nineties progressed, before ultimately reshaping whole swathes of the scene in its image by the time the decade was over. Like The Velvet Underground, they almost seemed to make more sense in the following decades than they ever did in their own time. The duo even delved into straight-up dub with their Rhythm & Sound records, which - similar to Bandulu's contemporary evolution - found the duo dealing in spacious, stripped-to-the-bones reggae that came on like Kraftwerk gone dub.

Now, if there's one thread to connect all of this firmly back into the 80s then it is surely digidub, that faithful post-dancehall music that was trip hop's shadowy fellow traveller throughout the decade. Smith & Mighty even put out Henry & Louis' Rudiments on their own More Rockers imprint, while their Steppers Delight EP (from 1992) seemed heavily influenced by digidub in its twisted proto-jungle shapes. The Dubhead and Dub Out West series of compilations chronicled first rate digidub springing from this nexus, with Smith & Mighty even turning in some digidub sides under the Blue & Red banner (which ultimately culminated in the Time Will Tell collaboration with Henry & Louis).

Coming in from the arena of real-deal reggae, the Mad Professor's Ariwa setup was a steady hand on the scene, running from the eighties firmly into the nineties, releasing atmospheric records like Aisha's High Priestess, Mad Professor Captures Pato Banton and the almost ambient-reggae of Bim Sherman's Miracle. Famously, the Mad Professor even reworked Massive Attack's Protection LP into the No Protection set, which was claimed to have surpassed the original in some quarters.

Similarily, Adrian Sherwood reworked Primal Scream's Vanishing Point into the excellent Echo Dek after cutting a parallel path through the same period. Sherwood's On-U Sound outfit put out records - significantly harder-edged - like the aforementioned Mark Stewart material, along with Tackhead's own output and leftfield dub experiments like African Head Charge and Creation Rebel. Like Ariwa, On-U Sound seems to offer a seemingly bottomless well of first rate dub (of which, if I'm honest, I remain woefully under-educated on!).

And then there's Jah Wobble, whose looming presence throughout the nineties found him appearing on scores of key recordings as the decade progressed. The man was everywhere! Dropping the throbbing bassline for The Orb's Blue Room and Primal Scream's Higher Than The Sun (A Dub Symphony In Two Parts), collaborating with Brian Eno on the Spinner LP and taking part in various trip hop excursions with the likes of Bomb The Bass, Ramshackle and Shara Nelson, you couldn't turn around without hearing his full-bodied basslines pulsing from the speakers. Throughout the decade, his own records with The Invaders Of The Heart were excellent excursions into post-fourth world soundscapes, often featuring techno figures like Andrew Weatherall behind the boards (as on the awesome Bomba).

Similarly, Bill Laswell's Material project returned after a five year hiatus with 1989's Seven Souls, a record whose own fourth world shapes seemed to ring in the decade with spoken word narration provided by William Burroughs. The record was effectively reworked ten years later on The Road To The Western Lands, which featured trip hop figures like Tim Simenon, Talvin Singh and DJ Soul Slinger. Hallucination Engine refined this formula and featured the awesome Mantra, which was reworked by The Orb and later kicked off their Auntie Aubrey's Excursions Beyond The Call Of Duty collection of remixes for other artists.

This compilation was yet another key gateway into post punk back in the day, featuring reworks of songs by Killing Joke and Wire alongside the Material entry. Also noteworthy is the presence of frequent Orb collaborator Thomas Fehlmann and Basic Channel's Moritz Von Oswald in the German post punk group Palais Schaumburg. One thing that makes The Orb fascinating is how they happen to spring from this post punk diaspora only to make a splash in the Second Summer Of Love with records like Little Fluffy Clouds and A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain That Rules From The Centre Of The Ultraworld (see also The KLF). You can just feel the implied presence of post punk in the surfaces of their music and in the pulsing dub engine within.

Check out this fascinating interview ¹ with The Orb's Dr. Alex Paterson where he gives something of a musical history of a life lived within music.

Consequently, Bill Laswell ended the decade with the awesome Dub Chamber 3 and Material's Intonarumori, a deeply warped hip hop record in the spirit of The Ghettovetts and Death Comet Crew, which leads snugly into the next week's episode. To be continued...

1. Check it out @ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Da9EMy_Ggs.

LISTEN NOW

TV6 Imperial Slates

Pato Banton My Opinion (Ariwa)
Colourbox featuring Lorita Grahame Baby I Love You So (12" Version) (4AD)
Blue & Red Amid The Ether (Shiver)
Renegade Soundwave Black Eye Boy (Mute)
The Sabres Of Paradise Ysaebud (Special Emissions)
Material Mantra (Axiom)
Massive Attack featuring Horace Andy Spying Glass (Wild Bunch)
Jah Wobble's Invaders Of The Heart Bomba (Nonsonicus Maximus Mix) (Boy's Own)
The Future Sound Of London Hot Knives (Virgin)
Meat Beat Manifesto Radio Babylon (Play It Again Sam)
Mark Stewart + Maffia High Ideals And Crazy Dreams (On-U Sound)
Primal Scream Wise Blood (Creation)
Red Snapper Thomas The Fib (Warp)
23 Skidoo Meltdown (Ronin)
Henry & Louis Beulah (Unforsaken Land) (Nubian)
Colourbox Looks Like We're Shy One Horse/Shoot Out (4AD)
Material The Western Lands (A Dangerous Road Mix) (Triloka)
Rhythm & Sound featuring Willi Williams See Mi Yah (Burial Mix)
Bandulu Detention (Burial Mix)
Leftfield El Cid (Hard Hands)

Dubstyle!

Posted on March 6, 2018 @ 9:44pm by Coqui

A slight diversion into dub presented by DJ Slye and starring a cast of thousands.

Now that we've reached this point in the whole Terminal Vibration trip - the mid-point to be exact - and what with all the talk of Jah Wobble and bass pressure and dread, well, it got me thinking about the original dubmasters and pulling out a bunch of my old dub records and messing around a bit on the turntables. The result was this rough little mix, which was largely inspired by a bunch of my old dub cassettes that used to get a lot of play back in the Colt days. My love affair with dub started in earnest way back in the late 90s with a King Tubby comp - the impetus for my exploration was trip hop, specifically Smith & Mighty's oeuvre - and since then I've never looked back.

Put crudely, dub was born on the b-side of the reggae 7" single, where the instrumental version of the a-side would be pressed so that deejays could chat over the top at the soundsystem Saturday night. Eventually, certain producers - producers like King Tubby, Herman Chin-Loy and Lee "Scratch" Perry - started messing around with the master tapes, accentuating particular aspects of the record, beefing up the bottom-end, dropping in snatches of the original vocal and running it all through the effects units, in the process fomenting a musical revolution. This was head music with a heavy beat, and things would never be the same.

Full-on dub LPs weren't long after, and dub's methodology (and arsenal of production techniques) even started to creep onto the a-side in more spacious, and spaced out, mixes. Eventually these techniques filtered out into pop music via post punk and disco - thanks to producers like Dennis Bovell, Adrian Sherwood, Walter Gibbons and François Kevorkian - and the rest was history: suddenly the combination of a mixing board and an effects unit became a musical instrument in its own right, and the virtuosos came fast and thick to work their magic in the ensuing years. It's hard to imagine the sound of the 21st century's crop of alternative r&b artists without dub's O.G. mad scientist innovations.

The idea with this particular mix was to trace the dub contagion from its peak-period mid-seventies development alongside contemporary Jamaican roots music through the digital (dancehall) eighties and the big beat nineties on through the next century, stopping off at outposts in dancehall, post punk, techno, trip hop and even grunge(!) before winding up at the lonely, desolate tundras of Rhythm & Sound. The cutoff point was dubstep, which will clearly merit a mix of its own. In truth, I envisioned Dubstyle! as a Star Wars-esque trilogy, with this mix standing as the A New Hope/Downbeat The Dub Ruler entry, to be followed this summer by a post-disco dancefloor extravaganza and wrappping up with an electro-dub/step-r&b apocalypse later this fall. And so... that should give you some idea as to what to expect. Or not?

This is by no means a primer (it actually departs from straight-up dub fairly quickly); think of it instead as a little tribute to a sound that has been very good to me (dub be good to me) over the years, a sound that wouldn't have been possible without a handful of mad producers who pushed their machines to the absolute limit, writing their dreams onto magnetic tape nearly fifty years ago and ushering in the future in the process...

Keith Hudson Hunting (Mamba)

Pushing off into Keith Hudson's mystical swamp of dub. The atmosphere comes on thick and heavy from the jump, with a trilling flute, jungle atmospherics, rolling percussion and a jagged guitar cutting its way into the darkness before that bass comes in and washes over EVERYTHING. This is 1974, son.

Augustus Pablo King Tubbys Meets Rockers Uptown (Clocktower)

Maybe the most famous dub record ever? Augustus Pablo runs Jacob Miller's Baby I Love You So through King Tubby's illogical deep space machinery and turns in a total killer. With Pablo's melodica stylings in full effect, this righteous slab of Morricone-inflected dub was only just edged out by the ramshackle caravan vibes of East Of The River Nile when I compiled the Parallax 200. Futuristic like Kraftwerk, yet ancient as the Ziggurat of Ur.

King Tubby Dub Fi Gwan (Blood & Fire)

As far as I know, this absolute gem only saw the light of day when Blood & Fire put out their Dub Gone Crazy: The Evolution Of Dub At King Tubby's 1975-1979 compilation. Unbelievable! It's a low key masterstroke, replete with moody organ, bottomless bass and exquisitely four-dimensional sound over a slow-motion 4/4 rhythm. The highlight for me is the disembodied clavinet that materializes in the drop out.

Joe Gibbs & The Professionals Gates Of Zion (Joe Gibbs)

This from the flipside of my 7" reissue of Chalice's Good To Be There, although I'm somewhat certain that it isn't actually called Gates Of Zion; it actually sounds like a dub version of Dennis Brown's Whip Them Jah Hah. I only know this because the actual Gates Of Zion appears on the 12" version of this single, which I tracked down on the strength of this very dub (only to be disappointed!). Confused yet? That's par for the course with reggae... versions all over the shop! Anyway, this is another excellent slab of organ-led discomix reggae - this time in quintessential Joe Gibbs stylee - anchored by a ten ton bassline and haunted by disembodied voices in the ether.

The Upsetters Return Of The Super Ape (Island)

Weird dub from the excellent Scratch-helmed Upsetters LP of the same title, which features striking sleeve art from Tony Wright of a rampaging giant ape holding a tree in one hand and a spliff in the other (surely one of the top five sleeves ever?)! This is peak-period Lee Perry, the mad scientist operating deep within his Black Ark studio and turning out a swampy, sun-glazed groove unlike anything else around. Watch in awe as that sleepwalking, low slung skank gives way to a heavy downbeat in the climax climax... French, you're one of a kind!

Aswad A New Chapter Of Dub (Mango)

Wicked electronic reggae creeping - like the contemporary work of Prince Jammy - ever so slightly into digidub territory. Got this on the back of a recommendation from the cat behind the counter at the shop where I picked up Return Of The Super Ape... damn, nearly 20 years ago. The star of the show is undoubtedly that fat, wandering electronic bassline, which pair with a rock hard drum beat to drive the group's signature drifting horns along with a mad haunted house grand piano!

Mark Stewart + Maffia Liberty City (On-U Sound)

Taking an abrupt left turn into abrasive post punk, we've got this killer cut from Stewart's Jerusalem EP, which also features the rock hard High Ideals And Crazy Dreams. Liberty City has that massive Adrian Sherwood-engineered Maffia bottom-end in full effect, joined here by a nagging sax refrain and sublimely spectral backing vocals rising from the ether. These Mark Stewart records are essentially the square root of trip hop. What with the Bristol connection, well, it stacks up. I've often wondered if the sound on these early Maffia records were inspired by the clipped, heavy duty basslines of the early Studio One material (see Burning Spear's debut). And are those discordant cuckoo clock sounds sampled from Fellini's Satyricon? I wonder...

Derrick Harriott Dub Whip (Hawkeye)

For me, this dub version of the Dazz Band's Let It Whip is one of thee key records of the eighties, existing as it does at the cusp of the discomix reggae and digital dancehall eras, its heady dubwise flavors are shot through with the neon glow of contemporary electroboogie. Running parallel to things like Grace Jones' Compass Point records, it also seems to contain the germ of Mtume's Juicy Fruit, Massive Attack's Protection and even SA-RA's The Second Time Around.

Prince Jammy Megabyte (Greensleeves)

The second record in this mix - in a row! - to feature in the recent Parallax 200 extravaganza. This from Jammy's wicked Computerised Dub set. All crisp drums and brittle textures, it's something like contemporary arcade music run through dub's hall of mirrors. Yet another one of these eighties records that mean the world to me, I'd single out it's Kraftwerk-gone-dancehall re-envisioning of Jammy's contemporary digital productions as particularly crucial. I wish I'd picked this up when it came out... five year old me would have loved it.

Soundgarden Fopp (Fucked Up Heavy Dub Remix) (Sub Pop)

AKA Last Action Hero Dub. The second bolt for the blue here, and probably the biggest surprise... bear with me though. This grunge-tastic cover version of the Ohio Players' Fopp (strangely enough, if you listen to the Players' original, the first minute seems to predict the whole grunge sound, vocal style and all!), taken from Soundgarden's second EP, lays the blueprint for the band's whole warrior chief sound (as heard in Spoonman, et al.). However, the dub version - perpetrated by grunge super-producer Steve Fisk - takes the track to a whole other level, showcasing the possibilities of dub within the context of rock 'n roll fury. With hollowed-out beats and a vastly more spacious mix, the guitar pyrotechnics of the original track compete with snatches of synth, film dialogue and spectral hints of brass and the blues as Chris Cornell's multi-tracked banshee wail pours down over the track like molten silver.

The Future Sound Of London Papua New Guinea (Dub Mix) (Jumpin' & Pumpin' )

I've always loved this short little dub version from the Papua New Guinea 12", which says everything it has to in just over a minute. It also makes the dub flavor of the original track - by virtue of its bassline nicked from Radio Babylon - literal, with rock hard drums tumbling down upside your head and down into the echo chamber.

Bandulu Run Run (Blanco Y Negro)

Sprawling deep space reggae from London's premiere electro-dub outfit. Positively holy music, as far as I'm concerned. I used to listen to this over and over back when I first got a hold of it, mind properly blown on the track's fathoms deep bassline and gloriously filmic sweep. Like reggae slowed down and stretched out across glistening infinity's plane. Records like Cornerstone, Guidance and Redemption came on like the ruff, rugged and raw street-level flipside to Basic Channel's elegant dub symphonies. Back in the day, Bandulu were basically my Led Zeppelin.

Peter D. Jah Pure & Clean (Nubian)

Majestic digidub from erstwhile Smith & Mighty secret weapon Peter D. Rose. With sweeping string vistas, synths and an ethereal vocal chorus all flowing into the mix, that tricky riddim still manages to take center stage. Originally from the Dub Out West Volume 1 compilation, I first heard it on Smith & Mighty's DJ-Kicks mix in the late nineties. It took me forever for me to track down its original source in the pre-Discogs era! Incidentally, the windswept drift of this track always makes me think of looking down at the beach from Mayagüez in the late afternoon under overcast skies, rain pouring down on the waves crashing on the horizon.

Terminalhead & Mr. Spee Twisted System (Ruts DC Dub) (Push)

The Ruts DC rework is where its at, with that gently gliding rhythm and haunting vocals in the mist taking the track to another plane altogether. I love the way those warped horns elbow their way into the mix from time to time, seemingly trying to wrest control of the track. Percussion like sheet metal phases in and out of the mix. The whole effect is quite uplifting, actually. Ruts DC were a punk band gone dub from the O.G. punk era, who happened to provide dubs to a couple of the Terminalhead records. You sort of wonder about how these things come about. One of the great things about the 90s was the way they were absolutely littered with unlikely little one-offs like this. Corny as it probably sounds, it's a big part of what made growing up in the era so special. I remember thinking at the time that this could have been a huge crossover hit... well it was in my neighborhood anyway.

The Sabres Of Paradise Wilmot (Warp)

This is essentially a dub version of Black But Sweet by Wilmoth Houdini & The Night Owls, perpetrated by Andrew Weatherall's Sabres Of Paradise. This the single version: the LP version from Haunted Dancehall rides a righteous skank, but strangely enough the block rockin' beats of the single version seemed to make the most sense in this context. That and the deadly Link Wray-esque guitar lines of Tom Baeppler and those maniacal, uncredited female vocals. You want to play this very loud. I've actually got an epic Weatherall feature in the works... so stay tuned.

Primal Scream Duffed Up (Creation)

More Adrian Sherwood, this time from much later, dubbing Primal Scream's 1997 LP Vanishing Point to abstraction (in much the same way that the Mad Professor had with Massive Attack's No Protection around the same time) on the Echo Dek mini-album (my version actually came as a box set of 7" singles). This tune is truly unlike anything else: brittle 808 electro drums, dubwise percussion, harpsichord and a warped horn section collide into a dread hallucination of what jazz might have mutated into in an alternate dimension. Someone really ought to put together an edit of the 1973 film starring Barry Newman with both Scream albums providing the soundtrack...

Bill Laswell Cybotron (ROIR)

Majestic dubbed-out slow-motion rotating phone booth music from Bill Laswell, Jah Wobble and Nicky Skopelitis in this post-Material project from the year 2000. This from volume three in the Dub Chamber series, so it's in good company. With a bassline as big as the ocean, this rolls on metronomic breakbeats and sheets of valve-soaked sound sweeping in and out view, receding onto the horizon. It's all rather cinematic. File under Neuromancer: possible soundtrack music, Vol. 127.

Rhythm & Sound King In My Empire (featuring Cornell Campbell) (Rhythm & Sound)

Basic Channel in straight up dub reggae mode, with the great Cornell Campbell on the mic. I remember back when these Rhythm & Sound records came out, it took awhile for me to work out it was the Basic Channel guys opening up a new chapter (of dub). These records were so empty, so pristine, so perfect, inhabited by that brilliant, lonely Chain Reaction sound. The other record from that era that I think of in the same breath was Plastikman's Consumed. This actually from a bit later, 2004. Dubstep waiting in the wings...

The Parallax 200

Posted on January 8, 2018 @ 10:41pm by Coqui

It's been three years and three days since I first posted the original Parallax 100, and I've been wanting to delve into the next 100 for some time now. Over the course of the intervening years, I've worked up a little list that I've tweaked here and there but have somehow managed to shape into a sequence as firm as the original rough-and-tumble 100.

The rules remain the same: each of these records have had a critical, sustained impact on me beyond the rush of a great new record, are all killer front-to-back and I still listen to them all the time. Albums, EPs and singles all rub shoulders here in what is - in the spirit of the original list - a deeply personal selection from the log book of my sonic travels.

Take it as a check-it-out list from a 21st century lapsed rave-dancing chrome-plated digital soul man chilling beneath the computer blue palms of the Parallax Gardens, sipping on a glass of cognac while the soundsytem is likely pumping out any of the following sounds on any given day while the Heights does its thing all around.

Once again, each and every one of these is a stone cold killer.

And so we descend...

200. Eden Ahbez - Eden's Island (The Music Of An Enchanted Isle)

(Del-Fi: 1960)

Mystic exotica from the man who wrote Nat "King" Cole's Nature Boy (he once said that he "heard the tune in the mist of the California mountains"). A concept album shaped around a drifter's encounters on a mysterious island, with gently swaying rhythms cut adrift in an ocean of sound. It's tempting to think of this as one of the very first "head" elpees, arriving just in time for the new decade.

199. Gwen McCrae - Gwen McCrae

(Cat: 1972)

Smoldering Miami soul, like an even more lush and lived-in take on Willie Mitchell's Hi Records output (Al Green, Ann Peebles, et al.). Gwen McCrae's tough vocal presence, already in full force on this her debut LP, is one of the great treasures in soul music. The centerpiece here must surely be the lavishly glazed, smoldering sway of 90% Of Me Is You, which remains one of the great downbeat jams in seventies soul.

198. 2 Men A Drum Machine And A Trumpet - Tired Of Getting Pushed Around: The Mayhem Rhythm Remix

(I.R.S.: 1987)

Improbably early oddball house from the two Fine Young Cannibals that aren't Roland Gift. The original version comes on like prime Yello, while the remix finds Derrick May stripping the track down to its essential organ/whistle framework (while not forgetting that trumpet!) and injecting a nagging piano vamp into this stop-start motor city groove.

197. Dâm-Funk - Toeachizown

(Stones Throw: 2009)

West Coast g-funk spanning ten sides of vinyl like an endless stretch of California highway. There's an almost undisclosed amount of straight up techno running throughout, emerging in the moody surfaces of In Flight and Keep Lookin' 2 The Sky, but the heart of the record lies in the blissed out machine soul of Brookside Park and I Wanna Thank You For (Steppin Into My Life). The atmosphere takes me back to endless summer afternoons in the heat of the mid-nineties, daydreaming to similar moods and grooves for hours on end.

196. Ananda Shankar - Ananda Shankar

(Reprise: 1970)

Raga-rock hybrid, in which massed choirs, oscillating Moogs and Shankar's sitar stalk the streets of Calcutta. First, you notice the excellent (and utterly unique) covers of rock 'n roll standards Jumpin' Jack Flash and Light My Fire, but it's the haunting downcast moments like Snow Flower and Sagar (The Ocean) that give the record it's unfathomable depth and dimension.

195. Yoko Ono - Walking On Thin Ice

(Geffen: 1981)

Icy disco inna new wave style by Yoko Ono, from the last sessions John Lennon ever played on (he was holding these tapes when he was shot). The surreal mood seems to predict both Yello's most atmospheric sides and David Lynch's later cinematic adventures, but Lennon's violent rubberband guitar solo still sounds wholly alien. It's all thoroughly in the tradition of the Plastic Ono Band records, with It Happened and Hard Times Are Over both incredibly moving expressions of a woman coming to terms with devastating loss and vowing to soldier on no matter what the future holds.

194. Nat King Cole and His Trio - After Midnight

(Capitol: 1956)

Well into his late-period career as a baroque pop crooner, Nat King Cole reunites with his original trio for some cool jazz action in a dream after-hours jam session. The group work their way through standards like It's Only A Paper Moon and a killer rendition of Duke Ellington's Caravan, while revisiting (Get Your Kicks On) Route 66 and even cutting the opening song from Tin Men (Sweet Lorraine).

193. Docteur Nico & L'Orchestre African Fiesta - L'Afrique Danse No. 8

(African: 1969)

The birth of soukous, the Congo's beloved post-rumba musical export. In L'Orchestra African Fiesta (the group Docteur Nico formed with Tabu Ley Rochereau), his finger-picking style came to define the sound of the genre. This record the eighth entry in an flurry of LPs that emerged in the late sixties to chronicle contemporary Congolese music, three of which were devoted to Nico and remain the easiest way to get ahold of the man's music. The whole set should be reissued - in a spirit similar to the William Onyeabor box set put out by Luaka Bop a few years back - with gorgeous sleeve art intact.

192. Augustus Pablo - East Of The River Nile

(Yard: 1971)

Instrumental reggae 7" crafted by man from the East Herman Chin-Loy around the singular Melodica stylings of Augustus Pablo. Its smeared exotica stylings and off-kilter skank always make me think of The Man Who Would Be King and Michael Caine and Sean Connery's long journey through the Khyber Pass and beyond.

191. Gilberto Gil & Jorge Ben - Ogum Xangô

(Verve: 1975)

Unfettered head to head guitar duel between two luminaries of MPB, wherein loose strings are bent into soaring fractals as guitars tango like clockwork in the sunset. Transcending even their most stellar individual work, the duo flutter between the lush calm of Nega and the wild careening frenzy of Taj Mahal. The fact that the vocals seem almost improvised, an afterthought even, only adds to the charm of this loose, freewheeling double-album.

190. Mantronix - Scream

(Sleeping Bag: 1987)

Electronic hip hop epic in widescreen. MC Tee's trademark rapid-fire raps hit hard before flipping into sing-song mode for the chorus, all of it backed by impressively futuristic production from Kurtis Mantronik. You also get an extended mix thrown into the bargain, along with a dub version - which might be the man's absolute finest - in which the track's filmic descending spiral gets chopped into strange shapes before shocking you with a cyborg rap in the climax.

189. DJ Rashad - Double Cup

(Hyperdub: 2013)

Chicago juke. I first crossed paths with Rashad's music via DJ Godfather's Twilight 76 and Juke Trax labels (this within the context of Detroit ghetto tech electro) back when I was living at the 1808, and I've kept an ear tuned in ever since. I was pleasantly surprised when he hooked up with Hyperdub a couple years back for both the Rollin' EP and this record, a true masterwork. Hypnotic synths soar over a bed of furious drum programming throughout, as slow-motion raps and bottomless bass twist and turn within. The man was a virtuoso and his music still sounds like the future.

188. Grachan Moncur III - New Africa

(BYG: 1969)

Grachan Moncur's great galleon of soul-inflected free jazz, coming out of leftfield on the storied BYG imprint (arguably the genre's spiritual home). Moncur's trombone flourishes glide gracefully over the loose, swinging rhythms of Andrew Cyrille and Alan Silva's wide open double bass as he trades lines with the likes of Roscoe Mitchell and Archie Shepp. It's the sound of wide-open spaces and crystal clear skies, full of freedom and possibility.

187. The Rolling Stones - Exile On Main St.

(Rolling Stones: 1972)

Stranded in the south of France, The Rolling Stones lose themselves in the basement studio at Nellcôte and manage to wring magic from the whole affair. Careening from the dirty barroom rock of Rip This Joint into the raw clavinet funk of Ventilator Blues and spending a satisfying amount of time with Gram Parsons-inspired country rock numbers, this band of dandy rogues turn out a ramshackle masterpiece that manages to capture the very essence of rock 'n roll.

186. A.R. Kane - When You're Sad

(One Little Indian: 1986)

Sun-warped post-Beach Boys blues. When You're Sad is a joyously aching teenage daydream with Alex and Rudi's gently soaring harmonies drenched in wild-eyed feedback. Meanwhile, the b-side's Haunting offers up an unresolved slab of guitar melancholy that seems to lay the blueprint for the whole shoegaze endeavor and by extension predicts the sound of nineties indie rock about four years ahead of schedule.

185. Joni Mitchell - Song To A Seagull

(Reprise: 1968)

The birth of canyon folk, featuring songwriter Joni Mitchell front and center with virtuoso guitarwork and that voice. In a bold move, Mitchell decided to rely entirely on new material rather than fall back on songs that she'd already provided to other artists (as was common practice for singer-songwriter albums at the time). The results are stunning, with a rich thematic continuity running through the record even as individual songs like Marcie and Cactus Tree glisten like gems in their own right, epitomizing everything that makes Mitchell's music such a treasure.

184. Burning Spear - Burning Spear

(Studio One: 1973)

The Burning Spear's debut album, full of deeply spiritual roots music. Bottomless bass and rock hard riddims play out in stately slow-motion while Winston Rodney's haunting vocals hover above it all like a ghostly mirage. Songs like Ethiopians Live It Out and Fire Down Below ride tough rocksteady beats into the sunset, while the deeply moving Creation Rebel and Down By The Riverside are among some of the most gorgeous roots music you'll ever hear.

183. Funkadelic - The Electric Spanking Of War Babies

(Warner Bros.: 1981)

The final Funkadelic record, where all previous electrofunk innovations are taken to their illogical conclusion. P-funk's engine is deconstructed, the parts spread out across the floor of a Detroit garage while the band methodically rebuilds them into freaky malfunktioning warped machines. The deliciously bizarre Funk Gets Stronger (featuring Sly Stone), seems to rev its engine only to reel it back down again in a nagging stop/start groove, while the title track re-routes their early guitar freakouts through the new wave hall of mirrors before wiring it all up for the next decade's dancefloors.

182. René Et Gaston - Spectacle De Foire

(Fresh Fruit: 1994)

Dutch techno par excellence from the inimitable Dobre and Jamez, in one of their myriad guises (Jark Prongo, Klatsch!, Tata Box Inhibitors, Chocolate Puma, etc. etc. etc.). The carnivalesque wild ride of Spectacle De Foire is undoubtedly the centerpiece here, but the Moroder-inflected digital disco pulse of Houp! seems to contain the germ of house music's next ten years in its gloriously geometric groove.

181. Cheb Khaled - Hada Raykoum

(Triple Earth: 1985)

Algerian raï from a true pioneer of the form. Cheb Khaled plays the cosmopolitan desert mystic, singing his winding, hypnotic chansons over sun-glazed synths and spidery machine rhythms in a stunning roots 'n future mash up that defies its period of origin with striking clarity. He'd go on to international stardom and eventual political exile in France, but this record - released smack in the middle of the eighties - remains Khaled's crowning achievement.

180. Public Image Ltd. - Metal Box

(Virgin: 1979)

Pre-eminent post punk malcontents lose themselves in the studio, intoxicated by the twin experimentations of krautrock and dub, in the process deconstructing the album format into three 12" singles packaged in a metal reel-to-reel film cannister. The ten-minute Albatross creeps out the soundsystem like a ghostly steamroller, Jah Wobble's ten-ton bass kicking you in the chest, while Keith Levene's searing guitar shoots sparks across its surface and John Lydon wails deep into the abyss. And that's just the first side...

179. Areski & Brigitte Fontaine - L'incendie

(BYG: 1971)

Iconoclastic chanteuse Brigitte Fontaine blends sophisticated songcraft with Areski's droning inflections (inspired by music of the Algerian musicians that he grew up around) in a haunting set of skewed chansons. Les Borgias and Ragilia are shot through with a distinct North African inflection, while Il Pleut Sur La Gare and L'abeille come on like Medieval folk ballads. The duo also touch on their jazz roots in Déclaration De Sinistre and venture into acid folk with L'engourdie, a gently psychedelic reverie. Indispensable.

178. The Black Dog - Spanners

(Warp: 1995)

Brittle art techno masterpiece. BDP's deep space sonics remain in full effect throughout this sprawling set of electronic head music, touching on everything from skittering techno to ambient house and the abstract hip hop that had informed their music since day one when they first set to work cloistered in the mystery of Black Dog Towers. The esoteric current running through the trio's work - that ancient quality haunting the music's shadows even as they pushed headlong into the future - inhabits every corner of this record and sounds like the soundtrack to some secret society in lunar orbit.

177. Mýa featuring Sisqó of Dru Hill - It's All About Me

(Interscope: 1998)

Siren song in 3D. Sumptuously produced headphone r&b laid down by Da Bassment cohort Darryl Pearson and masterfully inhabited by star-in-the-making Mýa. From that period when a slowjam would casually sound like a UFO landing in your backyard. Every element, from the crisp beats to the blurred instrumentation and of course Mýa's wistful multi-tracked harmonies, is meticulously placed and blissful to the ear.

176. Devin - The Dude

(Rap-A-Lot: 1998)

Lazing Texas rap from Devin The Dude, featuring guest appearances from the likes of Scarface, Spice 1 and the rest of his old crew, the Odd Squad. It's a supremely lush and mellow LP, to my mind surpassing even the excellent Fadanuf Fa Erybody as the finest full-length on Rap-A-Lot. A laidback, homegrown live sound prevails throughout, with deep blunted bass, smooth guitar runs, synth strings and dusted bleeps enveloping Devin's loose-limbed raps like a twilight mist.

175. Derrick Harriott - Whip It

(Hawkeye: 1983)

Discomix reggae cover version of the Dazz Band's immortal Let It Whip, self-produced by the great Derrick Harriott, which somehow manages to surpass the sterling original. The version on the flip is reworked by Paul "Groucho" Smyke, who also dubbed King Sunny Adé's Ja Funmi into oblivion around the same time. The sumptuously pulsing bassline quickly grows hypnotic as myriad shards of sound reverberate across the soundscape, marking this out as the neon-bathed cousin to the x-ray dubs of Lloyd Barnes on Horace Andy's Dance Hall Style.

174. Johnny Hammond - Gears

(Milestone: 1975)

Definitive jazz funk produced by the Mizell Brothers during their blazing arc of seventies studio excursions. This one is without a doubt my favorite, featuring veteran keymaster Johnny Hammond tinkling the rhodes over rock hard rhythms and soaring ARPs while that odd spectral chorus weaves its way in and out of the ether. The sound of the city.

173. Jonny L - Hurt You So (Alright)

(Tuch Wood: 1992)

Candy-coated ardkore from the man with the golden haircut, recorded well before he turned to the darkside and pounded the jungle scene into submission with his techstep brethren. The Full Mix rides tumbling breakbeats into the trancelike bridge before collapsing into a blissed out lovers rock chorus, while The L Mix brings hard-edged hoover stabs into the equation before exploding into the ecstatic piano-led climax.

172. The Beach Boys - Sunflower

(Brother: 1970)

My absolute favorite era of The Beach Boys is the six year period spanning between Smiley Smile and Holland. There's a strange charm and paradoxical rough-hewn smoothness to the sound that seems of a piece with both Lee "Scratch" Perry's sun-glazed productions at the Black Ark and latterly The Beta Band's oeuvre. The only trouble is, most of these albums are fairly patchy (thanks Mike Love). The one exception is Sunflower, in which Dennis Wilson emerges a master songwriter in his own right, kicking off the whole affair with Slip On Through's insouciant counter-clockwise groove and striking yet again with the immortal ballad Forever. Brian Wilson's presence remains in full force as well, lending his touch to the gorgeous sunstruck reverie Dierdre (co-written with Bruce Johnston), All I Wanna Do's ethereal drift and the ambient surf music of Cool, Cool Water.

171. Cheo Feliciano - Cheo

(Vaya: 1972)

Cheo Feliciano cut his teeth in legendary groups like Tito Rodriguez' Orchestra, the Joe Cuba Sextet and the Eddie Palmieri Orchestra before gradually descending into drug addiction and bad times. After a stretch of rough years and hard miles, Cheo kicks heroin for good and finally makes his record. A delicately crafted masterstroke, it finds him confidently working through a peerless set of Tite Curet Alonso songs like Mi Triste Problema and Poema De Otoño with unmatched depth and splendor.

170. Recloose - Spelunking

(Planet E: 1999)

Nocturnal electronic jazz from Detroit whiz kid Matt Chicoine. Standing outside the boundaries of any one scene or genre, he unfurled a number of exquisite delights on an unsuspecting public at the turn of the century, none better than this astonishing five track EP. Kicking off with the oddball deep house of Soul Clap 2000 before launching into Get There Tonight's off-kilter boogie and the bebop stomp of Landscaping, it's not long before he's easing into the half-lit downbeat moves of Insomnia In Dub and Four Ways Of Saying Goodbye's multi-part jazz funk excursion. A crucial record for me at the time, it's stayed with me ever since.

169. Blue Orchids - The Greatest Hit: Money Mountain

(Rough Trade: 1982)

An utterly out of time acid-soaked masterpiece, existing in the netherworld between post punk and a living, breathing psychedelia. The Blue Orchids splintered off from the mighty Fall, and in the process stretched that band's speedfreak intensity out into a wild, pantheistic celebration of the great outdoors. Una Baines' ghostly keyboard mirages are the crucial factor in these eerie, widescreen sonic tapestries. The mood here curiously similar to On The Silver Globe, and I've often thought that this album could soundtrack the haunting ritual beach scenes from the first half of the film.

168. The Mover - Frontal Sickness

(Planet Core Productions: 1991/1992/1993)

The soundtrack to your nightmares. Mark Arcadipane - the man behind The Mover - wrote the blueprint for rave hardcore with Mescalinum United's We Have Arrived and a sequence of uncompromisingly bleak 12"s that surfaced on his Planet Core Productions (yeah... PCP) imprint. This double-pack combines both volumes of the Frontal Sickness EPs into one blazing package of sonic extremism, ground zero for the zombie sound that would come to be called gloomcore.

167. Skip James - The Complete 1931 Session

(Yazoo: 1931/1986)

Stone cold blues from the Mississippi Delta. Skip James' music remains deeply unconventional, full of shadow and mystery, marking it out as utterly unique even within the rich terrain of early blues recordings. Still, there's quite a bit of weary joy to be found hidden within this record's grooves, even if only in the promise of salvation after a lifetime of hardship and tragedy. Hope against hope, in other words.

166. Cymande - Cymande

(Janus: 1972)

Cymande - featuring musicians from Guyana, Jamaica and Saint Vincent - are the sort of group that could have only formed in a town like London. Merging Jamaican Nyabinghi rhythms (the bedrock on which reggae was formed) and American funk, the crew forged a wholly unique sound that on first listen seems almost too good to be true. The glorious rock hard beat of Bra rubs shoulders here with gentle moments like Listen and the slow-burning groove of Getting It Back, while the eleven-minute Dove finds the group stretching out into a rolling longform jam. There ought to be a copy in every home.

165. Ramsey & Fen featuring Lynsey Moore - Love Bug

(Bug: 1998)

A particularly elegant slice of slinky UK garage, Love Bug's bionic two-step groove seems to expand on both the liquid garage sound of Roy Davis Jr. and Timbaland's android r&b. Diva Lynsey Moore's vocals get chopped and twisted through the tune's very fabric, in which every piece clicks like percussion in the clockwork machinery of this sultry digital juke joint jam.

164. Talking Heads - Remain In Light

(Sire: 1980)

Uptight New Yorkers cut loose in widescreen, stretching the impenetrable atmosphere of Fear Of Music to its outer limits as they mainline on African rhythms and the information overload of modern America. Each track is a dense web of sound spun from layers of throbbing bass, drifting synths, strange guitars and those rolling, poly-rhythmic beats. Hard to believe the album pre-dates the sampler, so intricate is its multifaceted construction. Indeed, you can hear the germ of nineties music (and beyond) buried deep within these unfurling, technicolor grooves... it sounds a lot like a blueprint for the future.

163. Tony Allen with Afrobeat 2000 - N.E.P.A: Never Expect Power Always

(Wrasse: 1984)

Eighties electro-afrobeat monster jam, with Fela Kuti's right-hand man in the driver seat, rocking the drumkit with singular style and finesse. N.E.P.A comes on like one massive arcing groove stretched over two sides of vinyl, each housing a song in two versions (with both an original and a dub) that probe different aspects of the same central theme. Sounding a lot like a pirate radio transmission from the distant future, this is the original groove that won't stop.

162. Prince Jammy - Computerised Dub

(Greensleeves: 1986)

Digital dancehall! This the instrumental companion piece to Wayne Smith's epochal Sleng Teng LP, produced by Prince Jammy, which famously brought reggae into the computer age. Taking Sleng Teng's brittle electronic rhythms into the spacious realm of dub, these tracks embody a sort of machine perfection that one usually expects from places like Cologne or Detroit, but slackened and smoked out with a singular Jamaican flavor.

161. The Three Degrees - The Three Degrees

(Philadelphia International: 1973)

The Three Degrees hook up with Philadelphia International after their appearance in The French Connection, resulting in a vocal masterpiece of lush Philly soul. The ladies' breathless harmonies deftly swoop and glide through the gossamer orchestration of Gamble & Huff's Sigma Sound, their exquisite production ringing clear as a bell. You can hear disco's wings begin to spread in the driving pulse of Dirty Old Man, while in If And When's epic balladry and the swirling A Woman Needs A Good Man their pathos is undeniable. You also get When Will I See You Again, quite simply one of the most beautiful songs ever written.

160. J Dilla - Donuts

(Stones Throw: 2006)

A joyful hip hop symphony composed by the late great J Dilla just before his untimely departure from planet Earth. Slicing and dicing all manner of loops and breaks from his seemingly bottomless crates of arcane records and reconstructing them into rock hard beats and interlocking movements, he created his unassailable masterpiece: a boundless, wildly shifting song cycle that feels like a glorious tribute to life itself.

159. Basic Channel - Quadrant Dub

(Basic Channel: 1994)

Dub techno par excellence. As difficult as it is to narrow it down to just one record from the dynamic duo of Mark Ernestus and Moritz von Oswald, for me Quadrant Dub just edges out Lyot Rmx for the #1 spot. Its two elongated tracks - spanning one to each side - last the better part of forty minutes, dubbing Round One's soul-inflected I'm Your Brother deeper and deeper into shimmering cascades of four-dimensional sound. Over twenty years later, it still sounds like the future.

158. Can - Ege Bamyasi

(United Artists: 1972)

In a further elaboration on the towering eighteen minutes of Tago Mago's Halleluwah, Can submerge their mercurial kraut-funk deep into the swampy voodoo of their Inner Space studio and surface with a spooked out set of seven songs teeming with otherworldly atmosphere. The proto-world music of Spoon sets a rhythm box against a gently swaying, lopsided rhythm, while I'm So Green showcases the group's pop sensibilities at their absolute finest. The spectral tango of One More Night even points the way toward Future Days and beyond.

157. J.J. Cale - Naturally

(Shelter: 1971)

Offbeat slacker blues debut from the great Okie troubadour, this one goes down like the smoothest bourbon at sunset. Containing the original, superior versions of After Midnight and Call Me The Breeze, it's a veritable treasure trove of exquisite songwriting. That crawling rhythm box is a particularly far-sighted touch, putting Cale in shared company with Kraftwerk and Sly Stone as the first artists to put electronic rhythms on record. In the context of the hazy dreamtime sparkle of songs like River Runs Deep and Crying Eyes, it's almost as if they're springing naturally from the surrounding terrain itself. A casual masterpiece.

156. Colourbox featuring Lorita Grahame - Baby I Love You So

(Virgin: 1986)

The a-side cover version of Jacob Miller's Augustus Pablo-helmed lovers rock standard is a post punk proto-trip hop masterpiece, submerging Lorita Grahame's torch song vocals within a murky stew of towering bass, metallic percussion and film samples from John Carpenter's Escape From New York. The flipside's Looks Like We're Shy One Horse, meanwhile, mines Sergio Leone's Once Upon A Time In The West over an apocalyptic groove skanking endless into some dystopian horizon as a blood red sun sets in the distance.

155. Brian Eno/David Byrne - My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts

(Sire: 1981)

Remain In Light's (edgier, younger and slightly mad) sister record takes its forward-thinking fourth world moves further yet into proto-sampladelia and the avant garde. Side one is stuffed with non-stop crazy rhythms: The Jezebel Spirit is a leftfield disco staple for good reason, spooling an actual on-air exorcism out over a frenetic rhythm matrix, while Regiment's stone cold funk is something like the interzone flipside of Once In A Lifetime. Side two stretches out into pure atmosphere, its individual tracks seeming to materialize from the shadows before drifting off again into the night, spectral and sublime.

154. Mr. Fingers - Ammnesia

(Jack Trax: 1988)

A quasi-compilation pulling together a whole raft of choice instrumentals from contemporary 12"s and unreleased material, this record offers a stunning glimpse into the mind of Larry Heard. Bookended by the genre-defining Can You Feel It - the song that took Europe by storm during the Second Summer Of Love - and Mystery Of Love (which has the distinction of being Larry Levan's favorite song of all time), the record also ventures into the deep space ambient house magic of Stars, Bye Bye's sleek electronic soul and the proto-acid madness of Washing Machine. Crucial in every respect.

153. Duke Ellington And His Orchestra - Ellington Indigos

(Columbia: 1958)

Exceptionally lush and melancholy jazz for big band, orchestrated and conducted by the late great Duke Ellington. Moody and spacious, the record evokes lonely nights, long moonlit walks and downbeat solo blues. Melancholy meditations like Solitude and Willow Weep For Me are swathed in layers of sumptuous atmosphere, while wistful reveries like The Sky Fell Down and Prelude To A Kiss overflow with the promise of romance. There's even a solitary vocal showcase in Autumn Leaves, featuring the vocals of Ozzie Bailey intertwined with Ray Nance's weeping violin, a haunting duet in a lonely place.

152. Gil Scott-Heron & Brian Jackson - Bridges

(Arista: 1977)

Steeped in nuclear dread, economic uncertainty and post-Watergate blues, Gil Scott-Heron and Brian Jackson casually laid down the definitive late-seventies soul album. I was turned onto this record by Moodymann's set at the first DEMF, which he opened with We Almost Lost Detroit (a rumination on the meltdown at Three Mile Island). I was blown away and simply had to track down the album, which includes songs ranging from Under The Hammer's synth-smeared funk to the downbeat blues of Delta Man and everything in between, each of them rising slowly from languid pools of soul.

151. Mobb Deep - Shook Ones Part II

(Loud: 1995)

The definitive statement in bleak mid-nineties hip hop, that era when the RZA's sphere of influence seemed to spread across the entirety of the genre. Showcasing the peerless words and sonix of Prodigy and Havoc, the loping unresolved piano figure of the epochal Shook Ones Part II is matched here by the more elusive first part, sounding like something that sprang from the same New York shadows that Terranova was just beginning to essay from across the Atlantic. You ain't a crook, son... you just a shook one.

150. David Bowie - Station To Station

(RCA Victor: 1976)

The return of the Thin White Duke, throwing darts in lovers' eyes, sings Bowie as the record opens, setting the stage for his transition from plastic soul crooner to fearless sonic trailblazer. Using his recent forays into Philly Soul as a jumping off point into churning proto-disco rhythms - shot through with the motorik drive of German groups like Neu! and his avowed love of Kraftwerk - he kicks off with the ten-minute multi-part rush of the title track and closes with a heartbreaking rendition of Wild Is The Wind, touching on everything from the insouciant funk of Golden Years to TVC 15's robotic pop in between.

149. Santana - Santana

(Columbia: 1969)

I'm a huge fan of Santana's music throughout the seventies, all of those excursions into space rock and interstellar jazz, but the raw frenzy of the debut remains my absolute favorite. This is where it all began, with the same band that rocked Woodstock within days of this record's release. Songs like Soul Sacrifice and the cover version of Babatunde Olatunji's Jingo are masterful in their building tension and release, while Evil Ways remains one of the great jukebox tunes of all time. If you dig the sound of the Hammond B3, then you need to get down with this record..

148. Janet Jackson - The Velvet Rope

(Virgin: 1997)

This is where Janet goes deep. There's a breadth and depth to this record that one usually expects to find in an Erykah Badu or Moodymann LP - you can really get lost in this record's grooves - but it's really just a logical progression of everything she'd been up to since the days of Control. Jam & Lewis square their production finesse in the age of Timbaland and - with the help of Q-Tip and a young J Dilla - unfurl a set of tracks that are both state-of-the-art yet at the same time imbued with the timeless gravity of 70s soul, remaining right at home in the present all along.

147. Robert Owens - I'll Be Your Friend

(Big Bubbles: 1991)

Released hot on the heels of his excellent Visions LP, this is my absolute favorite moment from Robert Owens (the voice of house music). Teaming with master producer David Morales and Satoshi Tomiie on keys, this seems to be an attempt to recreate the dynamic of their epochal Tears (masterminded by one Frankie Knuckles) in sprawling widescreen. The Original Def Mix is a moody dancefloor burner of the highest calibre, but The Glamorous Mix takes it to another level altogether, where driving strings and organ runs are woven into an echoic epic over which Owens' voice soars.

146. Wiley - Treddin' On Thin Ice

(XL: 2004)

Grime taken out to die in the frozen wastelands. Crafting a surprisingly varied landscape within this icy realm, Wiley roams between the crystalline garage moves of Doorway and the bleak tundra vision of the title track, essaying the almost straight up hip hop shapes of opener The Game and the shimmering r&b inflections of Special Girl along the way. I've always preferred Thin Ice to Dizzee Rascal's Boy In Da Corner, which is the classic grime LP by critical consensus (and a classic it is), but this ploughs a deeper furrow and remains my absolute favorite grime record.

145. Mtume - Juicy Fruit

(Epic: 1983)

Neon-lit bedroom funk from Miles alumni James Mtume, taking seventies cosmic jazz into the computer age. This is without a doubt the greatest electro boogie LP of them all, boasting computer blue dancefloor burners like Green Light and Your Love's Too Good (To Spread Around), while both mixes of Juicy Fruit remain twin pillars of atmospheric machine soul and a font of inspiration for so much music (from Dâm-Funk and SA-RA to Timbaland and The Neptunes) that I hold dear.

144. Yusef Lateef - Eastern Sounds

(Prestige: 1961)

When weaving this record's captivating pan-global menagerie of sound, Yusef Lateef looked East for inspiration, pre-dating just about everyone - from The Beatles to John Coltrane and even Sun Ra - in his exploration of the wider world's sonic shades and timbres. The Plum Blossom employs Chinese globular flute in it's off-kilter shuffle, while Three Faces Of Balal features a notably stripped-down exercise in rhythm. Rudy Van Gelder's peerless production imbues these sonic excursions with an almost exoctica-esque sense of space, remarkable within the context of contemporary jazz.

143. Tony! Toni! Toné! - Sons Of Soul

(Motown: 1993)

The There's A Riot Going On of swingbeat, Sons Of Soul is a lushly multi-textured record that makes for a dense, absorbing listen. Some strange turns are taken in the shifting corridors of this record's jazzed-out r&b (see the almost subconscious funk of Tonyies! In The Wrong Key), even shading into the epic with the closing ten minutes of the Anniversary/Castleers suite. I can't think of many records that I get as much pleasure listening to, regardless of the mood I'm in (indeed, Fun may be the most honest song title you'll ever come across).

142. The Future Sound Of London - Accelerator

(Jumpin' & Pumpin': 1991)

FSOL's sterling debut, featuring ten tracks of brilliantly vivid, four-dimensional breakbeat techno. A brace of tunes from the Pulse EPs get paired with new material like Expander and the epochal Papua New Guinea, rounding out a deft song cycle shot through with unmistakable cyberpunk vibes. From Buggy G. Riphead's striking sleeve art to the paranoid interludes and Central Industrial's slow-motion widescreen cascade, the whole thing conjures up imagery of Neuromancer, Blade Runner and Cabaret Voltaire in its long flowing corridors of Chiba City blues.

141. Forrrce - Keep On Dancin'

(West End: 1982)

Exceedingly warped, fathoms deep disco on the legendary West End imprint. Forrrce unleash a proto-rap party jam with an unforgettable whiplash bassline tearing through its very fabric, while François Kevorkian works his inimitable magic on the flip, stripping the track down to its frame and rebuilding it like a ramshackle minecart before running it off the rails through the illogical machinery of Jamaican dub.

140. The Upsetters - Return Of The Super Ape

(Upsetter: 1977)

Weird reggae forged by its greatest band and produced by Lee "Scratch" Perry at the peak of his powers. The title track is one of the finest dub outings ever, running down a languid skank before collapsing into a rock-hard slow-motion climax, while the Tell Me Something Good cover version blows away everyone I've ever shown it to. Throughout, Scratch coaxes the swirling sounds of the Black Ark into a singular negotiation of reggae roots and the deepest chasms of futuristic dub.

139. The D.O.C. - No One Can Do It Better

(Ruthless: 1989)

Of all the records to spring from N.W.A.'s axis, this is hands down my favorite. A dense, varied record, full of twists and turns like the liquid funk of the title track and the skittering fast-forward groove of Portrait Of A Masterpiece, it even features the entirety of N.W.A. on The Grand Finalé. Dr. Dre's ace production splits the difference between the hard edges of Straight Outta Compton and the nimble funk of Efil4zaggin, while The D.O.C. out-raps everybody else in the crew. No One Can Do It Better indeed.

138. David Crosby - If Only I Could Remember My Name

(Atlantic: 1971)

Cosmic canyon folk from ex-Byrd and CSN main man David Crosby, recorded in San Francisco and featuring local luminaries like Grace Slick and Jerry Garcia (along with further members of Jefferson Airplane, Santana and The Grateful Dead) and a few L.A. colleagues for good measure (including Neil Young and Joni Mitchell). This ad-hoc supergroup shines in Cowboy Movie's low-slung, eight-minute canyon funk jam (a chronicle of CSNY's dissolution as seen through the prism of The Wild Bunch) and the murky tumble of What Are Their Names' abstract, blazing protest, while gentle, otherworldly moments like Traction In The Rain and Orleans quietly steal the show with a shimmering magic all their own.

137. Television - Marquee Moon

(Elektra: 1977)

Sparkling proto-new wave from a four piece group of hard-dreaming CBGB luminaries. Picking up where West Coast acid rockers like The Byrds and Jefferson Airplane left off, Television reshape yesterday's wild psychedelia into a contemplative sonic menagerie - with just a hint of punk attitude - that ushered in a whole new era for rock.

136. Popol Vuh - Einsjäger & Siebenjäger

(Kosmische Musik: 1974)

Pastoral Krautrock from a large, shifting group of musicians centering around the vision of Florian Fricke. Gentle instrumental sketches like Kleiner Krieger and Morgengruß set the stage, gradually giving way to the title track's lush, multi-part longform jam - featuring the ethereal vocals of Djong Yun - that dominates the entirety of side two. The common thread running throughout is a bucolic sense of tranquillity and near-telepathic interplay between the musicians.

135. Underworld - Dubnobasswithmyheadman

(Junior Boy's Own: 1994)

Two holdovers from eighties new wave are joined by younger techno DJ Darren Emerson and dive headfirst into dance music, sculpting a moody masterpiece of electronic noir. Karl Hyde's rock dynamics are crucial to the record's singular tone, with the overcast alternative rock stylings of Tongue and Dirty Epic's subterranean guitar moves utterly unique within the context of nineties dance. This is "binary skyline" music, to borrow a phrase from Snakes, shimmering on a cloudy horizon.

134. Wally Badarou - Chief Inspector

(4th & Broadway: 1985)

Twelve-inch post-disco dancefloor action from synth wizard Wally Badarou, lifted from his excellent Echoes LP of the same year (recorded at Compass Point Studios in Nassau). The Vine Street mix by Paul "Groucho" Smykle is the absolute best version of Chief Inspector (and it can only be found here!), gliding along with percussion inspired by D.C. go-go and slipping into a zero gravity moonwalk for its dreamlike refrain. Tying together strands stretching from disco to post punk, dub to hip hop and even the nascent house music, Badarou winds up with an eerily prescient hallucination of the next twenty years of club music.

133. Terry Riley - A Rainbow In Curved Air

(Columbia Masterworks: 1969)

Late sixties minimalism from one of the prime architects of the form. Absorbing the hypnotic electric pulse of Indian classical music as a prime influence, Riley treats the organ as a proto-synthesizer and plays every note by hand, becoming the human sequencer as he multi-tracks myriad layers of keyboards, harpsichord, tambourine and goblet drum into a cycling electronic ballet on the sidelong title track. The flipside's marathon workout, Poppy Nogood And The Phantom Band, trades kinetic flow for gently droning arcs, with Riley's improvised saxophone dancing across its surface.

132. Jefferson Airplane - Mexico/Have You Seen The Saucers

(RCA Victor: 1970)

Jefferson Airplane are the embodiment of radical sixties counterculture's interface with rock and are the obvious precursor to seventies German groups like Amon Düül II (the commune that coalesced into a band) and Ash Ra Tempel. This 7" single stands as their greatest merger of righteous joy and anger into a triumphant firebrand vision of acid rock, continuing the everyone sing at once (preferably in a different key) and let the chips fall where they may late-period sloppy proto-punk vocal style that they'd pursued since Volunteers. Mexico, possibly the greatest song about smuggling marijuana into the country, expands on the spirit of songs like We Could Live Together, while Have You Seen The Saucers is quintessential West Coast space rock, setting the stage for Paul Kantner's Jefferson Starship and Blows Against The Empire.

131. Japan - Adolescent Sex

(Ariola Hansa: 1978)

Sleazy new wave glam rock, where punk meets disco in the red light district. You can see where Duran Duran got most of their ideas (executing the whole Sex Pistols meets Chic equation years before it had even occurred to Nick Rhodes and Simon Le Bon), and I've often thought that you can hear a bit of Royal Scam-era Steely Dan in the jazz-tinged grooves of Wish You Were Black and Television. An utterly original sound in evidence throughout, this record deserves to be be more widely heard (and imitated).

130. Dillinja - The Angels Fell

(Metalheadz: 1995)

Cyberpunk jungle. Taking in the sonic skyline of Vangelis' Blade Runner Blues and sampling a snatch of Roy Batty's "tears in the rain" speech from the film's conclusion, Dillinja runs riot with his trademark depth charge bassbombs and speaker-shredding breaks to create one of jungle's all-time greatest rollers. The two tracks on the flip pursue the same path of shape-shifting, aerodynamic drum 'n bass intensity, rounding out a three-track set of superbly engineered breakbeat noir.

129. Black Sabbath - Black Sabbath (U.S. Version)

(Warner Bros.: 1970)

Led Zeppelin and Blue Cheer may have gestured ominously in the general direction, but this monolithic, towering LP was the de facto birth of heavy metal. Slowing hard rock down to a robe-shrouded crawl, Black Sabbath injected a blood-soaked sense of the occult into their music while everybody ran for cover. A key outpost in rock's grappling with James Brown's elegant, funky beats inna caveman stylee, this stone tablet is cherished by rock, rave and hip hop heads alike (just ask Ice-T and Joey Beltram). Containing five ruminations on slow-motion fury, for me the debut remains their finest hour.

128. Ambassadeur International - Mandjou

(Badmos: 1979)

Mande music snaking its way through the desert sands of Mali, cooked up by the region's finest band and fronted by the inimitable Salif Keita, whose piercing wail cuts through the dense instrumentation like a knife. The towering title track rocks a dusty downbeat rhythm before breaking into a double-time frenzy in its coda, while Kandja refracts Caribbean music back across the Atlantic in mutant form. Balla closes the record on a gentle organ-led shuffle (think Booker T. & The M.G.'s), with a vibrant repartee between the band as they ride off into the sunset together.

127. The Cosmic Jokers - The Cosmic Jokers

(Kosmische Musik: 1974)

Endless cosmic jam by an ad-hoc supergroup of Krautrock luminaries, the results edited down into a series of five spaced-out kosmische LPs (of which this is the first) by Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser without the knowledge of the band. This is true outer space/inner space music, with one extended track sprawling across each side. The opening Galactic Joke is a pulsing excursion into deep sonar architecture - its guitars arcing gracefully into oblivion - while the flipside's Cosmic Joy inhabits a dark textural sprawl that ultimately spawns a ten-ton bassline. The record should come with a spacesuit.

126. Donna Summer - I Feel Love

(Casablanca: 1977)

Brian Eno once called this the most important record ever made, and when you hear it booming over a nightclub soundsystem at full volume it's pretty hard to argue. Pulsing machine music produced by Giorgio Moroder, this forward-thinking computer disco remains wildly influential. And then there's the matter of Donna Summer, who takes the whole affair to another plane altogether, her voice soaring in graceful arcs around that central rhythm and putting all manner of would-be divas to shame in the process. This is hardcore.

125. Masta Ace Incorporated - Sittin' On Chrome

(Delicious Vinyl: 1995)

For my money, the greatest late-summer hip hop LP ever. East meets West in this extended song cycle about two cousins from opposite coasts spending a summer together in the city that never sleeps. If you imagine a rap record produced by Roy Ayers, you wouldn't be too far off. Even the skits are good. This always takes me back to August of '95 when my brother and I were refinishing a deck for walking-around-money, tripping out under the blazing sun with Jammin' z90 coming through like a mirage in the Santee heat... Born To Roll, the man said.

124. Bobby Konders - House Rhythms

(Nu Groove: 1990)

The perfect encapsulation of Nu Groove's half-lit, anything goes vision of house music, where reggae, disco, ambient and acid rub shoulders on the dancefloor and nobody misses a beat. Of course it's hard to choose just one Bobby Konders 12", but this one's the reason the man's a household name where I come from. From the rolling pianos of Let There Be House to the searing 303 lines of Nervous Acid, Massai Women's eerie Serengeti atmospherics and the sprawling deep house epic The Poem, it's an unmissable EP of off-the-wall New York house.

123. Massive Attack - Protection

(Wild Bunch: 1994)

This is the sound of my youth. I could have picked any of their first three LPs, but this one's dubbed out, rootsical bass architecture marks it as my absolute favorite. The voodoo calm of Karmacoma, Weather Storm's invisible soundtrack, Mushroom Vowles, Tracy Thorn's mournful croon, the smoked out Light My Fire cover version, Horace Andy's x-ray falsetto, the depth-charging 303 basslines, Nicolette's serenading of the spirits and Tricky's dread magic - still in full force at this point - all blur into the perfect prescription of blunted Bristol blues and a true smoker's delight.

122. Charles Mingus - The Black Saint And The Sinner Lady

(Impulse!: 1963)

Mingus' Impulse! debut finds him righteously at home in the house that Trane built, working through a series of four complex suites inspired by Duke Ellington that - with all apologies to Count Basie - seem to take big band jazz into the atomic era. Mingus was so impressed with Bob Theile's in-house production that in the liner notes he proclaimed that his fans could throw out all of his old records because this was the sound he was after all along!

121. Horace Andy - Dance Hall Style

(Wackie's: 1982)

Skeletal, dubbed out reggae from the concrete jungle. Black and white newsprint paranoia reigns supreme throughout, not unlike a remake of The Parallax View set in contemporary Kingston. Spying Glass, later covered by Massive Attack, drapes gutter-glazed synths over its stately, slow-motion crawl. Horace Andy's lonely falsetto is cloaked in layers of desolate production courtesy of Lloyd Barnes, who stretches these solarized riddims out into echo-chambered infinity.

120. Hashim - Primrose Path

(Cutting: 1986)

Dark and moody electro dubbed out into a mirage on the fabled Cutting Records imprint. Hashim advances from the sparse, crisp edges of his epochal electro jam Al-Naafiysh (The Soul) into deeply blunted terrain, the sound of which seems to strangely overlap with that of certain late-period post punk records like 400 Blows' Declaration Of Intent in its slap-bass fueled approximation of William Gibson's visions of the future. This always makes me think of riding around with Snakes back in high school, bombing down the lonely corridors of Grantville and Mission Gorge at night.

119. Sinéad O'Connor - The Lion And The Cobra

(Ensign: 1987)

The spectacularly powerful debut, and the unacknowledged midpoint between Kate Bush and Neneh Cherry (by way of 4AD). A treasure trove of striking moments, ranging from the machine rhythms of Jerusalem and I Want Your (Hands On Me) (which seem to trace a jagged line between Control and Buffalo Stance) to the warrior charge of Mandinka (featuring the unmistakable guitar of one Marco Pirroni) and the indie rock drone of Just Call Me Joe (sounding like The Breeders a couple years early), the record's heart lies in majestic numbers like Jackie and the drama of Troy's towering suite, while the lush folk balladry of Just Like U Said It Would B and Drink Before The War swoop in deftly to conquer all. O'Connor wields her voice like a weapon throughout, and on The Lion And The Cobra she takes no prisoners.

118. Kendrick Lamar - To Pimp A Butterfly

(Top Dawg: 2015)

After his stunning major label debut good kid, m.A.A.d city, Kendrick Lamar went on to top it soundly by improbably hooking up with jazzmen like Stephen "Thundercat" Bruner and Kamasi Washington, crafting a vital modern rap record in thrall to figures like The Last Poets and Gil Scott-Heron. There's a wealth of material here, from the staggering modal grandeur of How Much A Dollar Cost to King Kunta's nightclub stop and the free jazz interludes in between, while the bleak intensity of tracks like u and The Blacker The Berry are balanced by occasional moments of lighthearted euphoria like These Walls and i. The sonic breadth in evidence throughout is matched only by the vast array of subjects Lamar explores over the course of this often harrowing - if ultimately uplifting - record. Someday, someone will write a whole book about this record.

117. Michael Jackson - Smooth Criminal

(Epic: 1988)

The kid from the Jackson 5 delivers yet another pop masterpiece, the claustrophobic machine shapes and soaring chorus of which mark it out as my absolute favorite moment from the man. The Extended Dance Mix stretches the tune's crashing groove to nearly eight minutes of sonic perfection, with Jackson vamping sublime over its protracted jam. I've often thought this tune was a kindred spirit with the contemporary techno output of Detroit's big three: when those gorgeous, soaring synths hit in the chorus - Jackson's vocals sliding effortly across the surface - you're cruising the same sprawling metropolis corridors essayed in Reese's Rock To The Beat, Rhythim Is Rhythim's It Is What It Is and Model 500's Off To Battle. File under futurism.

116. The Ragga Twins - Reggae Owes Me Money

(Shut Up And Dance: 1991)

Swashbuckling ragga ardkore produced by PJ and Smiley of Shut Up And Dance. Setting the tone for the nineties, this swings wildly from the breakbeat madness of Ragga Trip and Wipe The Needle to Illegal Gunshot's straight up dancehall moves and the awesome EWF-pillaging groove of The Killing. The instrumental 18" Speaker - a bassbin-shattering slab of dubbed-out ravefloor magic - spools wild bleeps across a shuffling breakbeat strapped with a bassline like an oil tanker. One of those records where everything comes together to form an unlikely masterpiece (in truth SUAD had quite a few of those under their belt), this is what raving is all about.

115. MC5 - Kick Out The Jams

(Elektra: 1969)

Legendary proto-punk Detroit heavy metal. Maybe the wildest live album ever recorded, and certainly my favorite. The title track and Come Together ride great churning riffs deep into the redline, while I Want You Right Now seems to split the difference between Wild Thing and 1983...(A Merman I Should Turn To Be) in a slow-motion come-on of epic proportions. The closing Starship borrows from Sun Ra in a wild freeform launch into the stratosphere, rounding out a chaotic masterpiece that manages to transcend its era and feel brazenly alive in the present.

114. Rodriguez - Cold Fact

(Sussex: 1970)

An urban troubadour rises from the streets of Detroit to cut a blistering folk LP. Rodriguez hits plain and direct throughout - rather than hiding behind layers of abstraction - as he chronicles his singular visions of the inner city. Each of these tunes progress with a wicked internal logic that slowly creeps toward their inevitable conclusion (like the baptism scene from The Godfather). I only recently learned that it was arranged and produced by disco/funk stalwarts Mike Theodore and Dennis Coffey. Right on!

113. Stevie Wonder - Fulfillingness' First Finale

(Tamla: 1974)

The lushest, most laidback LP from Stevie Wonder in the seventies, an era when the man could do no wrong. After surviving a near fatal car accident the previous year, he seemed to enter the studio in an even more introspective mood than usual. Indeed, aside from the blistering electronic funk of You Haven't Done Nothin' - the last in his line of songs to take on our very own Parallax icon Richard Nixon - this is by far his most mellow album of the decade. Even more lavishly arranged than usual, it features appearances by figures like Minnie Riperton, Syreeta and The Jackson Five, lending their rich backing vocals throughout, while Tonto's Expanding Head Band coax the verdant shapes of their machines into a sumptuous bed of sound.

112. Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five - New York New York

(Sugar Hill: 1983)

Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five, firing on all cylinders, dropped this 12" hot on the heels of their debut full-length and somehow managed to surpass everything on it. A crucial, forward-thinking elaboration on The Message, with a next-level reality rap flowing sharp and precise over skyscraper-crumbling beats and a searing, futuristic production, this anticipates and exemplifies basically everything I love about modern music.

111. Jungle - Jungle

(XL: 2014)

Jungle came out of nowhere a few years back with this absolutely blinding album, a sterling debut haunted by a dozen of their gloriously fractured dancefloor hymns. Sounding wholly alien and unlike anything else around, I like to imagine this intoxicating hall-of-mirrors post-disco trip would have sounded right at home pumping out the immaculate soundsystem at the Paradise Garage. These shimmering grooves shift and slide like liquid metal, melting into a sonic T-1000 reclining at the cutting edge of dance music and pop.

110. Edu Lobo - Cantiga De Longe

(Elenco: 1970)

The mesmerizing Edu Lobo's most intimate record finds him unveiling a thoroughly unique take on lush Brazilian samba. I always liked how Woebot would refer to him as "the Brazilian Bryan Ferry". Here you definitely get that same sense of sophisticated languor one finds in Roxy's more downbeat moments. The peerless Quarteto Novo, fresh from Miles Davis' Live/Evil sessions, provide sumptuous backing with their patented turn-on-a-dime rhythmic panache and nimble touch. Everything here is light as a feather, yet deep as the ocean.

109. Alice Coltrane with Strings - World Galaxy

(Impulse!: 1972)

Cinematic free jazz with its eyes locked firmly on India. Alice Coltrane takes her boundless vision into widescreen with a full string orchestra in tow for this record's five swirling rhapsodies. Her masterful reworking of late husband John Coltrane's A Love Supreme breaks into a leftfield beat that leaves you blinking in disbelief at the improbable perfection of it all, while the sprawling Galaxy In Satchidananda feels like the soundtrack to some metaphysical sword-and-sandal epic set on an alien planet orbiting a distant star.

108. Van Morrison - Astral Weeks

(Warner Bros.: 1968)

Wild-eyed Celtic folk troubadour cuts loose with a jazz combo, reaching his true potential as he unleashes a stone cold masterpiece imbued with gentle soul and a spiritual elegance all its own. The heart of the record lies in sprawling character studies like Cyprus Avenue and Madame George, where Morrison lingers on these sad characters longer than most would dare. Sweet Thing and the title track seem to magnify the sum total of human love until it threatens to eclipse all of its bitterness and hate, embracing the world in its weary arms. And really, what could be better than that?

107. Monoton - Monotonprodukt 07

(Monoton: 1982)

Dense NDW. This is a space music that sounds like something SETI picked up on a particularily long range scan, those churning alien sonics emanating from within the center of some distant black hole. Voices echo just on the outerrim of the soundscape as fractal synth sequences pulsate all around, literally absorbing everything within reach. It feels like a staircase spiralling off into oblivion as gravity's pull draws you ever deeper into the churning vortex below. Surreal and occasionally disturbing - like late-period David Lynch - and the true soundtrack to In The Mouth Of Madness.

106. Model 500 - Night Drive

(Metroplex: 1985)

Juan Atkins's second release on his own Metroplex imprint is characteristically ahead of its time with its ultra-modern stripped down production and racing computer blue sequences. A lone driver's tale unfolds, recounting a freaky trip through the nocturnal highways of Techno City and the mysterious passenger he encounters along the way. The flipside is a turbo-charged rework of No UFOs (the centerpiece of the first Model 500 record), which finds Atkins short-circuiting World War III by landing a spaceship in your backyard. A bold, angular line drawn through the middle of the 1980's... this is what Detroit Techno is all about.

105. Pere Ubu - The Modern Dance

(Blank: 1978)

Rising from the ashes of post-industrial Cleveland, Pere Ubu are without a doubt one of the great American bands (in fact, they're almost too good to be true), working up their own unique brand of post-Velvets racket long before punk - let alone post punk - even existed. In the past, I'd always gravitated toward their earliest sides (essayed on the Terminal Tower compilation) but over the last year or so the razor-sharp precision of The Modern Dance finally won me over once and for all. This is either the sound of perfection perverted, or perversion perfected... take your pick.

104. Tim Buckley - Happy Sad

(Elektra: 1969)

Dreamy, jazz-inflected folk from one of the early visionaries of the Laurel Canyon scene. Lazy reveries like Strange Feelin' and Dream Letter drift weightlessly beneath the setting sun, even as a curling undertow continues to build up deep within until the interminable jamming of Gypsy Woman threatens to pull all of its surroundings into orbit before collapsing into a swirling vortex of proto-Krautrock intensity. Sun-baked with an undercurrent of dread, this is the L.A. of Inherent Vice.

103. The Doors - Strange Days

(Elektra: 1967)

Monumental, unclassifiable moody psychedelic cabaret rock 'n roll from the days when giants roamed the lazy beaches of California. Jim Morrison comes on like a twisted beat-poet crooner (echoes of Eden Ahbez in full effect) while Ray Manzarek wields his keyboards as if they were synths. Meanwhile, John Desmore seems to draw his tricky rhythms from anywhere but rock and Robbie Kreiger's crystalline guitar style anticipates Carlos Santana. The whole effect is entirely unique, yet so easy to take for granted owing to the sheer magnitude of their historical impact. Utterly essential.

102. Terranova featuring Manuel Göttsching - Tokyo Tower

(All Good Vinyl: 1997)

German b-boys cut loose in widescreen with Krautrock legend on guitar. Basically a jazz record, Tokyo Tower is eight minutes of somber perfection, while the flipside's Clone is a slab of seriously bleak microtonal madness that drops you into the middle of The Parallax View without map or compass. Terranova's album from a couple years later was good, but this right here is magic. When this first dropped, it seemed to me like a record from another age... whether that age was twenty years in the past or twenty years in the future, I'm still not quite sure...

101. Sneaker Pimps - Splinter

(Clean Up: 1999)

Chris Corner steps out of the shadows to front his own group - sounding like some unholy blend of Scott Walker and Marc Almond - who wrap him up in the raw architecture of feedback and ragged downcast beats on the long road to ruin. The whole trip feels deeply unhealthy and self-destructive - making plenty of stops in some incredibly dark places along the way - yet somehow in its resolute, brave stance finds itself at a strangely uplifting conclusion, crawling through the basement to find redemption. If OK Computer were as good as everyone says, it would sound an awful lot like this.

NOTE:

To continue onward to the original Parallax 100, click here.

CHR-007: Parallax Pier

Posted on June 20, 2017 @ 7:36pm by Coqui

Two years ago, when Kayli was staying at the Parallax Room, I put together this little mix in the spirit of the moment. Summer was dawning, the heat was rising and the palms was swaying, so the time seemed right for a little Compass Point action. Parallax Pier was born, and it became the seventh Cheap Hotel release, seeming as it did to flow naturally from The Clash At The Edge Of Forever compilation. I was all set to upload this mix way back in December but there seemed to be something wrong with the idea of putting such sunny music out there in the dead of winter! This is summertime music, pure and simple, post-disco music with gulf stream tendencies (linking New York to the Caribbean, the Black Ark to the Paradise Garage). This is music born from the place where the ocean meets the shore, hence the compilation's central theme.

Over the last decade or so, there's been lots of ink spilled on the yacht phenomenon - put crudely, canyon folk and jazz artists getting down with a light disco groove in the mid-seventies onward (see Crosby, Stills & Nash's Dark Star, Pablo Cruise's Love Will Find A Way, Steely Dan's Hey Nineteen, etc.). There's even a yacht cover band making the rounds locally! Of course there's loads of great music that's been mined from this seam, but the sound I'm discussing at the moment is a very different phenomenon.

If yacht is muted pastel shades, sports jackets and boat shoes (think Carly Simon at Martha's Vineyard), this music is all vibrant colors, Hawaiian shirts and worn sneakers (inna Club Paradise stylee). This is the sound of post punk new wave going to the beach, the vibes and production techniques of Jamaican dub and Afrobeat creeping their way into the pop charts, the post-disco wave breaking on the shore and pulling back into the sunset to reveal all manner of ocean life dancing in the sand. This compilation captures this very select strain of tropical boogie that just so happens to encompass some of the greatest music of its era. Its spiritual home was Compass Point Studios in the Bahamas and on the dancefloor at the Paradise Garage, and its spectre lived on in the output of leftfield house labels like Nu Groove, Warriors Dance and Jumpin' & Pumpin'.

Slye and I have mixed the original compilation into a non-stop excursion through the coastal vibrations of the Parallax Pier. Apologies for a few of the more ramshackle transitions... please bear in mind that the original compilation's sequencing was planned without the mix in mind! Simply click the play button below to listen...

... and we're off!

Burning Sensations Belly Of The Whale (Capitol, 1983)

Pushing off with this slab of calypso-inflected new wave from LA, we find that the Parallax Pier is not a million miles removed from Club Paradise. Discovered this only recently thanks to a Pops-initiated endeavor in which we were scouring the 91x Top 91 songs by year, looking for forgotten gems that he'd dug back in the day. At first you think it's just another zany new wave trifle but then that gorgeous climax hits you like a wave crashing on the shore. Apparently lead singer Tim McGovern re-recorded the song very recently, which is available for download...

Eddy Grant Electric Avenue (ICE, 1982)

Surely everyone knows Eddy Grant's electro-tinged post-disco evergreen? Gloriously warped sonix prevail and yet that beat is locked down inna grid Devo-stylee. I've long had a fascination with Grant and his whole ICE setup, the Coach House Rhythm Section, Time Warp and so on. His records predict the spirit of Compass Point more explicitly than just about anything else I can think of (with certain exceptions to follow!).

The original plan was to include Walking On Sunshine - the opening track to his 1978 album of the same name (which also features the excellent Living On The Frontline/The Frontline Symphony suite) - instead, but ultimately figured that Electric Avenue's production was a tighter fit with the rest of the music here. Still, it's something to consider for the inevitable second volume...

Cloud One Flying High (Heavenly Star, 1982)

Crisp, immaculately arranged electronic post-disco action from the great Patrick Adams and Peter Brown. Five years on from Atmosphere Strut, this takes that record's gaussian-blurred psychedelia into the eighties with those same trademark synths writhing against an electroid bassline and geometric percussion patterns while an uncredited vocalist intones the title over and over and over. I've always wanted a copy of Don't Let This Rainbow Pass Me By - the midpoint between both records - but have yet to come across it in the field.

I'm often intrigued by Brown's Heavenly Star imprint, which dealt not only in excellent post-disco boogie but also the sounds of early hip hop. Catching my eye as I was thumbing through Freddy Fresh's The Rap Records ¹ some time ago, I only recently noticed that the label put out a remix 12" of Spoonie Gee's Spoonie Rap, my absolute favorite first-wave seventies rap record.

The Police Voices Inside My Head (A&M, 1980)

Big chant! Sting echoes the track's title (and not much more) over his own twisting bassline while Andy Sumners cloaks everything in chiming guitars, Stewart Copeland holding everything down with his inimitable presence behind the drum kit. This was big on dancefloors of the era (along with the Common Sense cover version), indeed its gulf stream vibes seem to epitomize the sort of freewheeling exotic moods and grooves you might find at the Paradise Garage at the time. The track's durable rhythm managed to weave itself into the very fabric of post-disco music in the ensuing years, from hip hop (Chill Rob G) to house (KC Flightt) and even r&b (702 featuring Missy "Misdemeanor" Elliott).

Grace Jones Pull Up To The Bumper (Island, 1981)

The Compass Point All Stars are all over Grace Jones' Island trilogy. This peerlessly engineered rubberband post-punk disco is from Nightclubbing, the second record in the trilogy and a documented Parallax favorite. I've gone on at great length about the Compass Point All Stars before - what I really ought to do is gather all of this content into a feature - but suffice it to say that they are the The Funk Brothers of this whole sound (that is, the key element in this story).

Only recently discovered the ultra-vibey music video, featuring a be-suited Jones doing her thing as Blade Runner-esque cityscapes cycle past in the background. Needless to say, Ms. Jones is a thoroughly fascinating character. I've been looking forward to reading her recently-published autobiography, I'll Never Write My Memoirs, as soon as I get my hands on it.

Madonna La Isla Bonita (Sire, 1986)

Along with the Jellybean Benitez-helmed Holiday and Into The Groove, my favorite Madonna tune. Maybe the first hint of her later direction, heralded by the conceptual Like A Prayer LP, which marked her out as a permanent institution in the pop marketplace. The production maybe not quite as fabulous as its surroundings here, it's nevertheless a sumptuous, wistful reverie.

Nu Shooz I Can't Wait (Atlantic, 1986)

Killer electro pop. I remember loving this one at the time - it dropped not long before my second trip to Puerto Rico as a kid - and I'll forever associate it with what was a very special time in my life. Nu Shooz were a husband/wife duo from Portland, Oregon. Nevertheless, they managed to capture perfectly the hot fun in the summertime atmosphere: palm trees swaying in the breeze as seagulls circle above, swimming pool reflections dancing off every surface (appropriately, the album is titled Poolside) as the sun settles on the horizon.

Big Audio Dynamite A Party (Columbia, 1985)

More dawn of sampling bizzness from Mick Jones and co. Curiously in thrall to the nascent digital dancehall. I've always loved the drum sound throughout this album, but especially in both the electroid Sudden Impact! and this track, which are from it's under-explored second side (all the hits are from the first). Especially cool how Jones chants the lyrics for the first 3/4 of the song's running time before Don Letts drops in to reiterate the selfsame story in rapid-fire ragga chat, squeezing it all into the last fourth before Leo Williams emerges with the baritone response.

Note the presence of Paul "Groucho" Smykle behind the boards, in the midst of his excellent eighties run engineering everything from reggae slates like Gregory Isaacs' Night Nurse (Discomix) and Derrick Harriott's Dub Whip to the post punk disco three-way of Jah Wobble/The Edge/Holger Czukay's Snake Charmer 12", a killer remix of Ja Funmi by juju icon King Sunny Adé and Wally Badarou's sterling mid-eighties work.

Wally Badarou Chief Inspector (4th & Broadway, 1984)

Case in point this sublime bit of low key, rolling synth-boogie. Just casually brilliant post-disco magic brought to you by Compass Point's key(board) man, taken from his excellent Echoes LP (which also features Mambo, the basis for Massive Attack's Daydreaming. The 12" version - which I reckon is one of the key records of the decade - is even better (but runs just a bit too long for the purposes of this compilation), featuring Groucho himself behind the boards yet again.

Gwen Guthrie Padlock (Garage, 1983)

More Compass Point magic from post-disco chanteuse Gwen Guthrie, this EP of the same name came out on Garage Records (Larry Levan's label associated with the Paradise Garage) alongside N.Y.C. Peech Boys and the Black Mamba record. Levan stretches out five of Guthrie's tracks and dubs them to abstraction, Gwen's voice resplendent throughout, inhabiting her environment like a queen in a crystal palace. One of the great kiss-off tracks, I always love it when Gwen sings You blew it, you blew it, you blew it! just before the chorus hits.

Tom Tom Club Under The Boardwalk (Island, 1981)

With Tina on holiday from the Talking Heads, the Weymouth sisters - with Chris Frantz in tow - get down at Compass Point with the All Stars and turn out one of the great girl group records of the era ² (the self-titled debut). This single, a cover of The Drifters' perennial favorite, followed hot on its heels and wrought the same magic from all parties involved.

Billy Idol Congo Man (Chrysalis, 1982)

Offbeat coda to the original version of Billy Idol's solo debut, which was replaced by Generation X's Dancing With Myself for the US release. Maybe not as earth-shattering as that hit new wave record, but with Idol chanting nonsense over a dubbed-out conga rhythm for about a minute - bringing to mind Iggy Pop's awesome Jungle Man - it's certainly a strange bit of something special.

The English Beat Ackee 1 2 3 (Go-Feet, 1982)

The group's debut, I Just Can't Stop It, was so exceedingly brilliant that their follow up albums couldn't help but pale in comparison. This track, however - from their swansong Special Beat Service - is the equal of anything on the debut, seemingly drawing from soca, highlife and South African jive to work up an utterly infectious slice of new wave dance pop. A great song to dance to.

Orchestra Makassy Mambo Bado (Virgin, 1982)

Sparkling soukous from Tanzania. From their excellent Agwaya LP, which was among the first African records that I ever owned. The band shifts and turns like clockwork over a wonderful 4/4 pulse, liquid bass propelling from within and driving the whole thing relentlessly forward. Apparently this track also had a 12" release at the time. Band leader Remmy Ongala went on to have a solo career later in the decade, hooking up with Real World for a couple albums.

Haircut One Hundred Favourite Shirts (Boy Meets Girl) (Arista, 1982)

This was another one that came to light in the Pops-helmed excavation of 91x's old yearly charts. I'd always heard the name and assumed they were synth pop in the vein of Heaven 17, rather than the glittering indie-pop contemporaries of Aztec Camera and Orange Juice that they turned out to be. I djed and my old room mate's wedding a few years back and when my set was over I threw this album on and everyone jumped into the hotel pool, still dressed to the nines. It's A Wonderful Life at The Pearl!

Third World Now That We Found Love (Island, 1978)

Incredibly lush and verdant disco-inflected reggae. Like much of Eddy Grant's seventies output, this sounds just preposterously, stupidly ahead of its time. If you played this for me in the late-nineties, I would have guessed it had come out something like five years earlier in the decade. Of course, it's from 1978. A shimmering reggae cover version of The O'Jays' standard, stretched out to nearly eight minutes, its pulsing 4/4 beat and liquid organ-tinged groove is effortlessly propulsive.

Crashers Flight To Jamaica (Cool Runings) (Capo Disco, 1981)

Bringing it all back home is Crashers' island-tinged post-disco chestnut Flight To Jamaica (Cool Runings). Like nearly everything else here, that central groove is just exquisite, rolling along at a lazy mid-tempo as the uncredited vocalists moonwalk across its surface with their soaring refrain. Those sun-glazed ARP strings and shimmering melodica stylings are just the icing on the cake. Features the immortal line, I'm so cool, I'm about to... freeze! Which, come to think of it, just about sums up this whole affair to a T...

With all apologies to the artists that were ultimately excluded, not due to quality but CD running time constraints and the very particular vibe that coalesced around the selection:

Thomas Leer, Dinosaur L, Billy Ocean, Sheila E., Rockers Revenge, Affinity, Ian Dury, Talking Heads, Liquid Liquid, FSOL, Sam Mangwana, Happy Mondays, King Sunny Adé & His African Beats, Open House, Joe Gibbs, Men At Work, Bobby Konders, Ashford & Simpson, Bang The Party, Lola, The Clash, Central Line, No Smoke & The Mali Singers, Carlton, Arthur Russell, Marianne Faithfull, Robert Palmer, Lizzy Mercier Descloux and The Teardrop Explodes.

Some of which will most likely be making an appearance when the inevitable Volume Two rolls around...

1. Freddy Fresh, The Rap Records (1st Edition) (Howlin', 2004), 97.

2. No mean feat, considering the likes of the Bangles, the Go-Go's, Klymaxx, The Pointer Sisters, Bananarama, the Mary Jane Girls, Vanity 6, ESG and The Slits were all plying their trade around the same time.

Day-Glo Dreams

Posted on December 16, 2016 @ 7:11pm by Coqui

There exists a particular sound that seems to leap out the speakers in vivid colors, engulfing its surroundings and drawing you into its world. I've come to refer to this as the day-glo sound. There's a four dimensional character to it... you can hear the neon in the air around you. It's something that's captured my imagination from day one, and I've been wanting to pull these records together for some time now. They tend to spring from the intersection of new wave and the dancefloor (at least initially), but in truth you might find them just about anywhere, from rap to techno and machine soul.

The reason I find this particular sound to be crucial is that it manages to spark up brilliant images in the mind's eye even as it throws spectacular shapes across the dancefloor. This is music for the mind, body and soul. It's verdant and full of life, with a four-dimensional depth that's thoroughly engrossing. Indeed, it's no surprise that some of the greatest pop music has keyed into this sound. It's particularily germane to the present moment, and I wouldn't be surprised if it pointed a way out of the quandary music currently finds itself in.

Rather appropriately, we begin our survey at the dawn of the eighties. There are bits and pieces from earlier records that may hint in the general direction, but they ultimately belong to a parallel lineage (one that I plan to discuss sometime next month). It's in the eighties that the day-glo aesthetic truly catches fire, coloring each of these records from the sleeves on down to the sonics held within. In rough chronological order then...

The English Beat - I Just Can't Stop It (U.S. Version)

(Sire: 1980)

If we're talking day-glo, then there's no better place to start than with The Beat. Coming from the late-seventies ska revival (as spearheaded by The Specials and their Two-Tone stable of artists), they stand out by virtue of their sumptuous sonic palette. The Specials debut - with its stark black-and-white sleeve design and Elvis Costello's no-frills live-in-the-studio production - was thoroughly monochromatic working week music. From the baleful tenor of Concrete Jungle to the dead-end doldrums of Too Much Too Young, it was packed with no-nonsense photo-realistic documentary reportage.

In contrast, I Just Can't Stop It leaps out the speakers in vivid shades of violet and magenta, like neon lights dancing against the jet black of night. Mirror In The Bathroom, from the production on down, must be one of the most futuristic records ever produced. With five humans locked into the metronomic pulse of Everett Morton's drums and David Steele's creeping basslines, it almost seems to approach a state of machine music in its motorik drive and clockwork precision, with every texture clutching at your ear and pulling you deeper into its world.

You can sense the glitz of disco seeping into the post punk vanguard here,¹ cementing the day-glo aesthetic that would color so much of the decade's music. An affinity with Giorgio Moroder's motor-disco, the spangled shapes of Prelude and above all the tropical, dubbed-out sounds of the nascent Island disco output can be felt throughout. The music spread across the entirety of this LP seems to exude a balmy glow, practically defining the word vibrant. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it remains one of my absolute favorite pure pop records of all time.

D-Train - You're The One For Me

(Prelude: 1981)

This is the point where post-disco morphs into eighties electro-boogie (see also Kleeer/Universal Robot Band, along with everything going down in Minneapolis at the time). You're The One For Me maintains the metronomic linearity of disco, lacking the top-heavy verticality of eighties electrofunk, but its machine rhythms do bear a striking resemblance to those of the electro boom looming on the horizon. James Williams' soaring vocals swoop and glide over spangled synthetic shapes, wired into that central electronic groove, while Hubert Eaves III (the man behind the seventies jazz funk tile Esoteric Funk) gets busy on the keys. The instrumental version even begins with a liquid synth figure that sounds like loose wires shooting electricity across the third rail, kicking off a wild subway ride into the depths of the New York night.

Indeed, the whole Prelude aesthetic sits comfortably within the day-glo realm, from the rambunctious electronic shapes of The Strikers' Body Music, shifting and burning over tight mechanical rhythms, to the more organic sounds of Empress' Dyin' To Be Dancin', still firmly grounded as they are in the rules of disco proper. Much of it has a vivid, compact clarity that seems to predict the architecture of eighties dance, but D-Train's You're The One For Me represents that crucial step forward, heralding a sea change in the way dance records would be constructed. Just compare 1980's Gap Band III to 1982's Gap Band IV, Cameosis to Alligator Woman or even Off The Wall to Thriller!

Associates - Sulk

(Associates: 1982)

Another well-documented favorite of mine. It's also another singular pop record shaped in disco's shadow, combined with the arch grandeur of film music in an overwhelming clash of sonics. A definite case where the sleeve really captures the sumptuous moods found within. This music suggests ornate ice sculptures spiralling into the sky, crammed with so much richness of detail that they threaten to come crashing down at any moment, while Billy MacKenzie's shrieks pierce through their crystalline corridors with wild abandon. Every texture seems to pulsate fiercely, wherein unstable elements garland paranoia and raging emotion: this is blacklight affair music.

Songs like It's Better This Way and Skipping careen at a furious pace, seeming to combine euphoria and dread into a single emotion, every surface shimmering like storm clouds caught in a ray of sunlight. Conversely, No and Gloomy Sunday glide along at a more stately pace - with MacKenzie almost seeming to revel in his grief - but are no less overwhelmingly powerful for it. Every corner of the record is imbued with a raging intensity, as if all the colors - shades of blue, green and violet - were burning too bright to last for long. The dreamlike Party Fears Two is something like the embodiment of this sensation.

The CD reissue includes a wealth of bonus material (up there with Fifth Dimension's bonus tracks in terms of enhancing the original album experience), including an astoundingly raw early version of It's Better This Way (titled The Room We Sat In Before) and the moody instrumental Grecian 2000. The former is a splendid showcase for Alan Rankine's guitar finesse, as he strangles strange tangled shapes from his instrument, while the latter is a masterpiece of electronic noir: a captivating post-disco pulse cloaked in a haunting synth refrain, evoking paranoid pursuit through deserted city streets in the dead of night. Needless to say, it's exactly the sort of thing we dig here at The Parallax Room.

Gwen Guthrie - Padlock

(Garage: 1983)

The Island disco sound that I'd mentioned in passing while discussing The Beat, was in large part fueled by the inimitable Compass Point All Stars. The All-Stars were a crucial conduit through which both discomix reggae and dubbed-out vibes entered the eighties mainstream, and everything they touched was shot through with lush tropical flavor and a new wave glow. They backed Gwen on her first three albums (Gwen Guthrie, Portrait and Just For You), picking up where they left off with Grace Jones' excellent Island trilogy (Warm Leatherette, Nightclubbing and Living My Life).

The Padlock mini-album finds Larry Levan remixing a selection of tracks from Gwen's first two LPs into one extended atmospheric trip. The production here conjures up images of a steamy dancehall bathed in primary colors as viewed through a funhouse mirror, evoking the spirit of Levan's Paradise Garage in its verdant, gently psychedelic atmosphere.² The abstract machinery of dub remains in full effect throughout, righteously casting this cutting edge post-disco boogie as the head music of the eighties. Just keep in mind, this is the sort of head music that you can't help but dance to.

Tracks like Getting Hot, with those glimmering electronic flourishes spiralling out into infinity, and Peanut Butter, riding atop those insane rolling basslines, both burn with a raw, almost tactile sensuality. Hopscotch appears here in its most minimal version, while the title track (as featured on Parallax Pier) gives you a front-row seat at Club Paradise. When Gwen sings We'll sail away to shores... in Seventh Heaven, backing synths pouring through in a rush of sunlight, it's as if the feeling of pure ecstasy has been captured on wax.

Barbara Mason - Another Man

(West End: 1983)

Soul woman Barbara Mason had a history in the seventies as a no-nonsense truth-talker, rough hewn and down in the nitty gritty, smoldering with hard-won intensity on records like Shackin' Up and Caught In The Middle. Coming out nearly a decade later, Another Man is a sequel of sorts to her ballad She's Got The Papers (I Got The Man), picking up where that tune left off - once the dust had settled on its romantic intrigue - with a humorous tale of infidelity and the realization that she really might not be his type after all.

Another Man has the shadowy, dubbed-out flavor you'd expect from a West End record, but it's wired to a cutting edge electroid groove that seems to be infused with hot pink liquid neon. Like D-Train's You're The One For Me, it's another killer late-period record from a disco powerhouse label that seems to cavort with electro in the half-light, laying out a blueprint for the future in the process. Notorious B.I.G. later used its sleek, depth-charging groove as the basis for his hit record Another, but trust me - you need to hear the original tune in all its glory.

Mtume - Juicy Fruit

(Epic: 1983)

The title track is rightly celebrated as a masterpiece of atmospheric machine soul (especially The After 6 Mix (Juicy Fruit Part II) version), while its striking music video perfectly captures the whole aesthetic on showcase tonight: day-glo and neon burning in the twilight. The florid magenta hues of those jackets they're wearing on the sleeve give you the first clue as to the vibes found within. Fog hangs over late night city streets bathed in neon. Cars creep in slow-motion by while the sounds of the corner disco seep out into the wider world, coloring the evening of the passers by.

This is post-disco funk music, fueled by rubberband basslines and twilight atmosphere (it's after six), cutting edge for its time it remains a pungent sound full of possibilities in the present. From Green Light's nimble, sure-footed boogie to the low key sway of Ready For Your Love, the group slide from dancefloor to bedroom with impeccable finesse. It all flows together so naturally, even as they take you to some unexpected places along the way (Hip Dip Skippedabeat is an electrofunk monster with a proto-rap that - in a strange twist of fate - recalls Lightnin' Rod's Hustlers Convention), that you can't help but get caught up in their moonlight vision. Without a doubt one of the great funk LPs of its era.

Wally Badarou - Chief Inspector

(4th & Broadway: 1985)

Compass Point's main keyboard man Wally Badarou strikes solo with an instrumental excursion that bravely expands on the groundwork laid out by the earlier Compass Point records, meshing lush jungle atmospherics with the power grid of the city. It's a rather astonishing tune to drop smack in the middle of the eighties, as it seems to predict whole swathes of the next decade's beat-oriented music even as it remains grounded in the gloriously lush post-disco climes of its day. The best of both worlds, in other words.

The original version - from his 1984 LP Echoes - was excellent, but the Vine Street mix on this 12" takes it to a higher plane altogether. When the verse's sleek groove unfolds into that insouciant low key moonwalk during the chorus - synths bathed in hypnotic half-light - it's as if you're gliding three feet above the ground. That it was released on 4th & Broadway is a perfect touch, as this was the label that would deftly navigate post-disco waters in the interzone between hip hop and house (charting the emergence of swingbeat and trip hop along the way). Rather appropriate for a record that plays like a roadmap to the future.

Keni Stevens - Night Moves (Ultra-Sensual Mix)

(Elite: 1985)

The original version, firmly of-its-era modern soul, gets stretched and spaced-out into timelessness by Andy Sojka (owner of Elite Records), Chris Madden and Keni Stevens himself at The Madhouse. The Ultra-Sensual Mix flows from its vocal to instrumental version flawlessly, recalling the low key half-lit brilliance of Lowrell's Mellow Mellow Right On when that tune memorably stretched out into its extended instrumental coda.

The central groove has been stripped down to an ultra-light frame and rebuilt like a graceful aero-glider, with not one element out of place. This has always struck me as something of a sister record to Barbara Mason's Another Man, those same sleek machine shapes grooving gently in the shadows. Yeah, I've gone on before about its rolling deep blue vectors bathed in moonlight, and yeah it's something of a touchstone around these parts; it's still a tremendous record. Paradise and polygons, you're in the grid now.

Model 500 - Night Drive

(Metroplex: 1985)

Early Detroit bizzness, which finds Juan Atkins picking up where he left off with Cybotron and No UFO's, venturing even deeper into nocturnal atmosphere and dubbed-out electronic shapes. Night Drive (Thru-Babylon) is surely one of the key records of eighties. It's just perfect, with Atkins' narration riding atop an elegant, starkly minimal electroid groove.

He's bombing up and down deserted Detroit streets, encountering strange freaks and existential loneliness in the darkness. That beat, a perfection of the electro structure, glides along like a rebuilt street racer. The vessel is cast deep blue on black, rushing past in luminescent streaks on the highway, everything bathed in scattered rays of unnatural moonlight. You're feeling the dread in that bassline, tronix swooping and rising like sparks over shimmering synth surfaces in otherworldly harmony, and your hands slowly tighten on the wheel...

Lola - Wax The Van

(Jump Street: 1987)

Late eighties post-disco action produced by Bob Blank (of Blank Tape Studios), with the fingerprints of one Arthur Russell in evidence throughout. Certainly many other Russell tracks could qualify here - the cavernous shapes of Dinosaur L's Corn Belt and Indian Ocean's madly abstract Treehouse/School Bell spring to mind immediately - but this one's low key brilliance sits most comfortably among present company. Its swirling texture and slow-motion groove seem to evoke the feeling of floating underwater,³ and as is usually the case when Russell is involved, that water is gonna be deep (inna Larry Heard stylee).

Every texture pulses, throbbing against that gently chugging rhythm like unsteady electrical current running through a wavering light bulb. Think early Carl Craig, particularly the gaussian blurred strokes of his Retroactive and Psyche/BFC material, but here everything is vivid and hyper-textured. Lola Blank's untamed vocals burst in and out of the mix as if she were inhabited by different personalities, while Arthur Russell does his inimitably subtle backing vocal thing (see also Loose Joints' Is It All Over My Face) throughout, poised just on the edge of the mix and weaving around Lola's breezily captivating lead to satisfyingly hypnotic effect.

Virgo - Virgo

(Radical: 1989)

Such a beautiful record, filled with the most absorbing house music you could imagine, made simply and elegantly by two Chicago kids armed with not much more than a DX-7 synth and a TR-707 drum machine. The Virgo album is essentially an expansion on the Ride EP, doubling the tracklist and stretching out into a thoroughly engrossing, immersive sonic trip. Sure, the gorgeous sleeve gives tantalizing clues as to the sounds held within, but dropping the needle on the record still never fails to take my breath away.

Do You Know Who You Are?, cloaked in lush synths cast in deep aquamarine, throws smooth shapes at placid angles off the clubhouse walls; it's as if you've passed through a door into the backroom and wound up on the far side of the galaxy. Tracks like In A Vision and Ride persist on a course through deep space, with luminescent textures routed through a hall of mirrors, cascading gently into infinity.

Starting with Ride, a handful of songs feature murmured vocals, feeling like a soft-focus take on what Jamie Principle had been up to during the preceding four or five years, placing sensitive, introspective men among the machines. Here, the duo fade into the mix like ghostly apparitions. All The Time is one such moody burner (vocals glide over the shifting ocean surface, locked onto the horizon), while Never Want To Lose You has the duo sneaking Bowie-esque into the foreground while an uncredited female vocalist intones acid house phrases like move your body! and listen to that beat!.

This lush machine soul reaches its twin peaks in both Going Thru Life - with those cascading synths and stark piano lines in spiral orbit over the deepest bassline you could imagine - while the warm geometric pulses of School Hall anchor a touching missive that surpasses even Kraftwerk's Computer Love in teaching machines to cry. There's this recurring moment when everything stops and the bassline just hangs there for a second - in suspended animation - before dropping back into the mix in a tumble of tones... oh man, it's one of my favorite things in the world.

Open House - Keep With The Pace

(Nu Groove: 1990)

More prime deep house, this time from New York's Mark Wilson. The whole Nu Groove aesthetic fits snugly within this realm (things like Rhythm Masters, The Sound Vandals and Bobby Konders' records spring to mind immediately). In fact, I often think that Nu Groove picked up on what the Compass Point All Stars had done and ran with it, bringing it into the nineties with their singular, multifaceted take on deep house. It's a sound that folds disparate strands of dub reggae, hip hop and r&b into its digital disco, offering up a definitive New York take on house music and a crucial stepping stone into the next decade.

Go directly to the New York Mix. Every surface is immaculate: that rolling bassline rides a gliding, shuffling rhythm with impeccable finesse, while underwater synths pulse deep in the background (making it feel something like a distant cousin to Wally Badarou's Chief Inspector). That oceanic synth - springing as it does from deep within the mix - certainly helps strengthen the comparison, sounding strikingly similar to the one rolling beneath long stretches of Badarou's track. Tons of tones tumble in and out of the ether, scattered against light reflected off the cityscape, as all surrounding entities are submerged into the deep. Shimmering and aquatic, this is underwater music for real.

The Future Sound Of London - Accelerator

(Jumpin' & Pumpin': 1991)

The next node in the sequence brings us to the UK. So appropriate that this follows, as I've often thought that Dougans and Cobain's early records owe a huge debt to not only the Nu Groove aesthetic but also Compass Point's: they wired that same verdant, kaleidoscopic atmosphere into rave's kinetic breakbeats and the stark futurism of Detroit. This is where the two meet. A definite cyberpunk flavor can be felt throughout, with shades of Cabaret Voltaire lurking between the cracks and of course Buggy G. Riphead's gorgeous artwork remaining a key period signifier. The Blade Runner vibes are most apparent in the shades of paranoia threaded throughout the record, and also in tracks like Moscow and Central Industrial, with the duo living up to their chosen name.

Accelerator is the culmination of all their early records, released under names like Humanoid, Mental Cube and Indo Tribe (indeed, many of these tracks had already appeared in various forms on the four volumes of The Pulse EPs). The opening track, Expander, rolls in on clouds of foreboding before dropping into a loose breakbeat groove, the unstable synth notes of the chorus spiralling out into crimson swirls. On the flipside, Central Industrial closes the record with a staggering downbeat rhythm, each and every texture piercing into the darkness like an early prototype of the duo's Yage visions. In between lies all manner of magic, from the freewheeling calypso shapes of Stolen Documents (yet another track that seems to recall Badarou's Chief Inspector) to the sumptuous shades of While Others Cry, with its uncredited vocals seeming to connect literally to the tropical flair of Compass Point.

A key ingredient running through many of the tracks is a riverbed of percussion lying just below the surface, placed within dubbed-out caverns of echo (see tracks like It's Not My Problem and 1 In 8),⁴ while another is the near-constant stream of subspace breakbeats threaded through a 4/4 techno beat-matrix. Tracks like Calcium and Pulse State unveil shimmering vistas, hypnotic swirls of sound painted in vibrant color against Monet-like skies. These are some of the album's deepest moments, during which FSOL perfect a sort of rolling, filmic techno, as if a perpetual motion machine's course had been charted into the sunset.

Then there's the matter of Papua New Guinea, which rides a slice of gently unfurling breakbeat magic over a bassline lifted from Meat Beat Manifesto's Radio Babylon, prefiguring the path of rampant sampladelia the duo would engage in for the remainder of the decade. Further related capers can be found on its 12" single, with an excellent Dub Mix and the Journey To Pyramid version in particular shot through with the vivid colors of a certain day-glo psychedelia.

Lovewatch - Wake It Up

(G-Zone: 1995)

The one you want is Guido's Aquasonic Ice Rink Dub. Check that bassline, the awesome DX-100 bass sound that graced hundreds of records from the era, sparring with the nagging refrain of an after hours organ emerging in violet shades from the darkness. The vocal version is no less special, with the presence of an uncredited dancefloor diva wailing defiantly against the track's sumptuous nocturnal backdrop.

I still remember stumbling upon this record at an indispensable thrift shop (whose name eludes me) that once existed down the street from the Clairemont Library back when I worked there after school. The place was a goldmine of dance and hip hop promos that had apparently been shed by local DJs in an effort to pare down their collections. I used to drop by every Thursday during my lunch break and pull loads of killer garage and rap cuts for next to nothing, so I've gotta give props to those cats for hooking a young (broke) brother up back in the day.

JT The Bigga Figga - Dwellin' In Tha Lab

(Get Low: 1995)

Lush, melodic Bay Area hip hop. The cognoscenti seem to prefer his earlier Playaz N The Game, but I reckon that this one's his masterpiece. Every surface seems to exude a warm glow as shapes shimmer in the darkness and colors get scattered at random. From the title on downwards, it's as if JT had immersed himself in the studio on a mission to conjure up the most amazingly vibrant sounds possible, smearing the rough-hewn edges of these homespun studio mixes into a sleek flow of rolling machine music. The result is casually psychedelic, but electrofunk tight.

All techno heads must hear Root Of All Evil immediately. Like E-40's In A Major Way, with its astonishing shades of Drexciya atmosphere, this seems to share an affinity with those same plangent computer sonics (via West Coast rap's roots in electro). The drums snap with a quintessential coastal crispness that dates back to the days of Arabian Prince and The Egyptian Lover, while the bass itself seems to melt into the spaces between.

JT's tight flow is augmented here by guest spots from Rappin' 4-Tay and San Quinn, along with other Bay Area luminaries like E-40, Mac Mall and Celly Cell elsewhere on the record, while shadowy figure The Enhancer crops up behind the boards on both Representing and the aforementioned Root Of All Evil. Free-flowing horizontal grooves like Ain't Something Wrong and Bay Area Playaz perfectly capture the feeling of cruising down the 5 as the late afternoon blurs into evening, the world half-lit somewhere between darkness and daylight (like in the movies), while the sun and moon ease onto the horizon at opposite ends of the sky.

Marshall Jefferson - The Animals EP

(: 1997)

Glorious technoid house from Chicago original Marshall Jefferson, released on the heels of his Day Of The Onion album but surpassing it in every way. That's a whole mini-category right there... Robert Owens' I'll Be Your Friend and Romanthony's The Wanderer spring to mind immediately. At any rate, I suppose that trilogy sits so comfortably together also because they're each instances of brilliant house artistes operating at the peak of their powers to forge masterful statements of futurist soul. All three of them stone cold classics.

The Horse is a fast-forward house rhythm, 909 snares bouncing everywhere - sparks shooting royal blue into the night, every surface glistening - and evoking the feeling of careening at top speed down the freeway in the middle of the night. The flipside almost sounds like something Kevin Saunderson might have knocked off during the same era - just think of The Dream, or even the E-Dancer remix of Blackwater - with a grinding bassline and rough cut percussion battling in full effect throughout. Pairing these tunes together was a stroke of genius, as the 12" taken as a whole seems to stand astride the twin worlds of house and techno, its unshakeable trancelike shapes shimmering gloriously in the milieu of late-nineties dance.

Luomo - Vocalcity

(Force Tracks: 2000)

Around the turn of the century, the minimal sound of micro-house revealed itself to be one of the leading hotspots in dance music for a spell. In truth, it's a sound that had been bubbling under for the better part of five years, but its sleek, gliding surfaces seemed the perfect sound to take house into the 21st century. Labels like Force Tracks and Kompakt became powerhouses, practically defining the sound in the public imagination.

The form threw up loads of great 12"s and even a handful of excellent albums, but - with the possible exception of Isolée's Rest - this one is my absolute favorite. It's a wholly surreal record that slips and slides through six deeply hypnotic missives of luminescent alien disco, perfectly capturing the state between consciousness and sleep... when dreams can bleed out into reality. Every track lasts ten minutes or longer, gliding on liquid machinery and fixed to the endless horizon, pairing lush machine shapes with seductive (and uncredited) human vocals.

The jazzed-out, three-dimensional electronic chords of Market set the stage, sparring with a squelching bass figure that gradually gains momentum, before swooping into a kinetic groove at the track's midpoint that seems to rearrange itself before your eyes. Getting down to the root of the matter, the flowing motorik drive of The Right Wing is closest thing here to the dubbed out techno of Basic Channel, who without question had a profound influence on the whole micro-house/minimal scene.⁵

Luomo share a similar mastery of the architecture of atmosphere, and employ it on a shadowy dancefloor half-lit in the moonlight under the stars. My absolute favorite moment, Synkro, is also the record's most spacious, with fathoms deep disco set adrift in a neon haze. Every element so lush that you feel as if you're swimming in its fluid textures as they tumble and cascade over one another. The mix practically defines the term four-dimensional.

Matching the deft play of mood and texture throughout this record is some truly stellar songcraft. Even without its heady production, Tessio would make for an excellent pop song. With the production factored in, the track is quite simply mind-bending, scattering those spongy bass tattoos - that seem to slide and shift gears beneath a clicking rhythm track - all across the soundscape, as two mystery singers engage in a fractal duet. Listening in feels like you're surfing waves of blurred emotion.

Outkast - Stankonia

(LaFace: 2000)

Throughout their tenure as Atlanta's unofficial hip hop ambassadors, Outkast had traded in verdant shapes and sounds. As far back as ATLiens, and even on their debut Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik, their music always seemed to exude a warm neon glow. Stankonia is the culmination of everything the duo had been up to during the nineties, and finds them descending even deeper into a sort of psychedelic machine soul.

The vibrant technicolor dream of Ms. Jackson is universally known (and deservedly so) - its lush sonic imagery could be heard everywhere at the time - and to this day it remains a masterpiece. The spectre of Prince looms large throughout, not only in Andre 3000's vocal moves but also in the record's dense, multi-faceted synth-led sound. Indeed, songs like Ms. Jackson and Humble Mumble seem imbued with the spirit of Paisley Park.

The electra-glide textures of Zapp, Mtume and Kleeer, are in evidence throughout, laying the groundwork for the next decade's glorious blurring of hip hop, funk and r&b. I'll Call Before I Come gets into undeniable Atomic Dog territory, but Stankonia goes even deeper into the realm of Funkadelic with the twisted psychedelic soul of the title track. Between its Eddie Hazel/Jimi Hendrix guitar figure and that wailing group chant, it conjures the same dread vibes as March To The Witch's Castle and predicts Brain On Drugs a couple years ahead of schedule.

This long, strange trip curdles with Red Velvet's gnarled computer funk and the strung out psychedelic soul of Toilet Tisha, offering a starkly modern update of Superfly for the new millennium. Perhaps nothing sums up the record quite like ?, a strange junglist sketch and the album's shortest track, it's title hovering over these proceedings like a spotlight... hinting perhaps that even to this day, Stankonia remains a riddle wrapped in an enigma: try as you might, you'll never get to the bottom of this one.

Basement Jaxx - Rooty

(XL: 2001)

Seeing these last three records together makes the turn of the century seem like some sort of golden age! Well, I suppose it was, after all. Jaxx's debut Remedy was easily the better record, but its sonics were sourced in wild pitch house and seventies disco (with Rendezvous and Red Alert coming on like turbo-charged Studio 54 gear). Rooty, on the other hand, seemed informed by the new wave eighties (with the duo at the time referring to their sound as punk garage), and moves beyond house into a sort of crazed maximalist boogie (I think they've got the kitchen sink in there somewhere). Which makes it right at home in present company...

Hard-edged tracks like Where's Your Head At (built around a renegade Gary Numan riff) and Get Me Off roll with reckless abandon through the gutters of the red light district, trading in just the sort of sleazy, low-slung glamour that I wish pop could manage to muster in 2016 (although next year will be another story altogether, I'm sure of it... fingers crossed!). Like contemporary Outkast, the duo channel Prince in Breakaway, sounding like a wild fairground ride experienced through a cracked funhouse mirror, while the album-opening Romeo recalls Sheila E. Coming on like Remedy gone freestyle, its squelching synths seem shot through with hot pink liquid neon.

Two years earlier, Jaxx paid tribute to the machine soul moves of Timbaland with U Can't Stop Me, a strung out slice of stop-start machine funk built on an approximation of the man's trademark spidery beat matrix. Circa 2001, it looked like they'd returned the favor, with Timbaland's work on Missy Elliott's 4 My People and The Neptunes' productions for Britney Spears (Toxic, in particular) sounding like dead ringers for the relentless house sound of Basement Jaxx. Golden age is right!

Metro Area - Metro Area

(Environ: 2002)

That initial run of Metro Area EPs were excellent, picking up where The Driving Memoirs left off, but introducing an expansiveness to the proceedings and opening up the soundscape considerably. This record is a culmination of those earlier releases, encapsulating a very special time with incredibly crisp, deep production that stands comfortably with the best records of the turn-of-the-eighties era that it's so clearly inspired by. Dan Selzer's stunning sleeve art really captures the mood here, all those half-lit mystery dancefloors out of the past, present and future. I played this one over and over at the time, even if I thought that Morgan Geist's contemporary Moves EP was even better. Now I'm not so sure. This is one of those records that takes a sound previously confined to 12" singles and tucked away on b-sides and gives it room to breathe across an entire double-LP.

The record kicks off with two tracks featuring the tight string arrangements of Kelley Polar. I've always though that Dance Reaction sounded a bit like a long lost dub of Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough. The first record seems to emphasize live musicianship, with everything from piano to terse vocal harmonies and even acoustic guitar embellishing the warm, uncomplicated soundscapes. Piña rides a Latin piano figure before slipping into Spanish guitar for the placid, dreamy coda. Itis Tandoor's live percussion runs through half the tracks here, opening up the sound considerably into a tactile, physical experience.

The string section and live playing give way to gorgeous machine disco on the second record, where things get down and dirty in a moody stylee. Those bright spangled synths take over, bouncing off the nightclub walls all around the listener as if Super Breakout had gone musical. I've always thought that Soft Hoop was this record's quiet masterpiece, that spongy synth sparring with the bassline in chambers of the deep, while Atmosphrique traps the listener in its hall of mirrors with an almost psychedelic play of, you guessed it, atmosphere. The closing Caught Up seems a fusion of both sides of this record, pairing the strings of the Kelley Polar Quartet and a gorgeous piano/organ duet with the rubberband synths and dubbed-out rhythms of the last four tracks in a moving conclusion to a quietly powerful record.

SA-RA Creative Partners - Double Dutch/Death Of A Star

(Ubiquity: 2004)

Nearly everything this crew put out would be eligible, but this one's here for a few reasons and they all have to do with the b-side, Death Of A Star (SUPERNOVA). First, those blacklight synths that seem to spray across the track like day-glo champagne, bathing its chanted vocals even as they threaten to take center stage. Second, those guitar trills that seem to recall nothing so much as peak-era Duran Duran, driving the beat before shearing off into the distance. Third, is the energy, the fire and the tune itself - after all, it wouldn't mean anything if it were just a finely executed pastiche - marking it out as one of the tunes of the decade. Conjuring images of some outerrim nightclub nestled among the stars, its cosmic disco spheres orbiting as they cast glimmering lights all across the firmament. Yea, this is another sleeve that perfectly illustrates everything the record's about.

This is the point where the day-glo impulse really came into focus again and began to catch fire underground, culminating in a lot of the best music from the last decade or so. The strung out autotune r&b of Double Dutch (CO CO POPS) predicts the sound of the latter half of the decade, even if I've never been crazy about it. As usual, however, the instrumentals are something special. SA-RA Space Theme is a low-key entry in their line of astral jazz outings - picking up where Herbie Hancock and Dexter Wansel left off - sounding for all the world like Herbie and Sly Stone jamming circa Fresh. Hangin' By A String, on the other hand, comes on like liquid neon, staggering along on a stop-start beat it seems to have been synthesized from unstable, radioactive elements. Part of SA-RA's charm lies in the fact that no one else sounds remotely like them.

Gorillaz - Demon Days

(Virgin: 2005)

I liked the first Gorillaz record a lot, so at first I missed the dubbed-out vibes of Dracula and Clint Eastwood. I got over it pretty quick though, as this is very much the superior record. What's more, parts of it seemed to key into the machine funk of Kleeer and Mtume... who would have guessed!? Check that synth squiggle in Feel Good Inc., featuring De La Soul in fine form, rough house rhyming over an electroid beat that cuts out just in time for the acoustic Staring At The Sun-esque chorus.

The sound at first seems more stripped down than the first record, but its really just a sleeker, more aero-dynamic approach. Tracks like Kids With Guns (featuring Neneh Cherry) and El Mañana are skeletal tunes built on spartan drum machine rhythms and glistening analogue tones. Opener Last Living Souls is cut from the same cloth, only in slow-motion. All Alone features Roots Manuva doing his bashment thang over roughneck breakbeat riddims and a garage bassline while Martina Topley-Bird swoops in angelic and sublime for the breakdown. The masterful Dirty Harry is that rare track to feature a children's chorus that works, spiralling into electro-funk territory once it really gets going and sounding like a dream version of something from Whodini's Escape. When The Pharcyde's Bootie Brown drops in on the mic for the guest spot, a ragged breakbeat takes over with its grinding bass accompaniment.

Dare is just perfection. Clearly one of the finest songs of the decade, it seems to pick up where the Dazz Band left off before immersing it all in vast cathedrals of sound. The record goes through various twists and turns before ending in a bizarre Brian Wilson hinterland, with Fire Coming Out Of The Monkey's Head featuring Dennis Hopper's narration (recalling old-time radio serials like Escape and The Mysterious Traveller) and the sumptuous Surf's Up moves of Don't Get Lost In Heaven, before swerving into the Rotary Connection-esque Broadway soul of the title track.

Dâm-Funk - Toeachizown

(Stones Throw: 2009)

This double-CD (5xLP!!) album is the perfect distillation of decades of West Coast machine soul, ranging from the rolling basslines of g-funk to the computerized rhythms of electro, taking in the squiggling shapes of Solar Records, boogie and even mysterious shades of straight-up techno for good measure along the way. Every track seems bathed in computer blue moonlight, wired up to neon (literally LAtrifying, as one song puts it) and drifting through a dreamlike haze. It's the perfect soundtrack to those late summer evenings spent cruising the sprawling web of city streets in the south side of California, just as dusk begins to fall, palm trees cycling by in the rear view mirror.

I certainly can't think of a record that better encapsulates the vibe of late afternoons and late nights down here in San Diego. It's the sound of crashing waves, the freeway stretching through rolling hills in burnt sienna and the grid of the city nestled within, the calm heat of the desert hanging wraithlike in the air. It's the sound of late night trips to your favorite taco shop, cruising down El Cajon Boulevard at midnight, or flipping through a stack of Parliament and Zapp records at your homeboy's spot. It's a million different memories all rolled into one, drifting bittersweet and beautiful out of the past like a mirage. For instance, I Gots 2 Be Done Wit' U always takes me back to August of '95 and afternoons spent listening to One Way and Kleeer, soaking up their atmosphere while playing Atari 2600. Later I'd go roller-skating with my brother and our main man Gregory, the day seeming to stretch on forever.

Tracks like Spacecapades and Keep Lookin' 2 The Sky seem to key into a stream of pure techno soul, as if the sounds of Detroit were refracted through the cool water of the Pacific Ocean to sound right at home in the Golden State. In a sense, it sheds some light as to why this music always made perfect sense to me, a kid growing up two-thousand miles away. Parts of this record bring back vivid memories of bombing around San Diego back in the day, listening to Model 500 and Drexciya in the moonlight, taking the longest route home to hear just one more song and stretch the magic out across the electric shades of the evening.

Ryan Leslie - Transition

(Casablanca: 2009)

A wildly inconsistent record, but a fascinating one with an engaging sound, seeming to exist comfortably alongside SA-RA and Dâm-Funk in the context of 21st century machine soul. Its release was tucked away toward the end of a year that had already seen one Leslie LP, his self-titled debut. Transition was apparently inspired by a late-summer romantic affair and knocked out in an off-the-cuff series of sessions. That its release was buried is the only way I can square the fact that it didn't bother the charts with songs like You're Not My Girl and Zodiac, sounding something like the hypothetical album Michael Jackson might have released between Thriller and Bad (circa Kleeer's Intimate Connection and The Isley's Between The Sheets).

Leslie made his name producing Cassie back in 2005, and after a few years he got the chance to launch a solo career of his own. This and the self-title debut came out during a period when I was mainlining on SA-RA and seeking out anything and everything in a similar vein. New Amerykah: Part One (4th World War) had just seen release the previous year, featuring tracks produced by SA-RA, and it seemed like something special was in the air. I remember when this and the Kid Cudi album dropped, and I was totally sold on their sleeve art from the jump: this had to be interesting. Actually, the sleeve is not a bad place to start if you're looking for a thumbnail sketch of the sounds held within, conjuring images of deep green vectors unfurling in slow-motion neon.

The album-opening Never Gonna Break Up more than lives up to the anticipation, with Leslie slinging luminescent analogue synths across a gently chugging rhythm while doing his modern soul man routine on vocals. Leslie 's thing is switching between r&b vocals and quasi-raps, which suits his productions just fine. A track like Sunday Night flows gracefully on moody synth swirls, while Nothing trades in almost new wave shapes. The new wave thing is actually in full effect throughout: All My Love even seems to recall New Order in its string/synth progression. The slow-burning post-disco boogie of You're Not My Girl just might be the finest thing here, rolling along on that nagging verse before slipping into its sublime refrain.

Jungle - Jungle

(XL: 2014)

This lot have been the biggest surprise since SA-RA, coming out of nowhere with a killer record that sounds unlike anything else around. I've gone in depth on them before. Not much to add, but I still can't quite believe that they exist... and I don't understand why they aren't the biggest thing around right now. Sari and I have caught them live twice, and both shows were excellent in different ways. I suspect they can make any venue their own, their atmosphere seeps into every corner of the space.

Possibly the first group to spring fully-formed from within the day-glo aesthetic, rather than approaching from a tangent (be it post punk, disco, hip hop or rave). I've said before that they seem to build their songs out of texture as one would sculpt matter: everything here is like day-glo cast in gold and chrome liquid set against jet black skies, where everything glows gently. It would have sounded incredible on the dancefloors of the Paradise Garage, yet it's perfectly at home in the context of now-pop, excelling most of the half-finished ideas that currently set the charts ablaze. This of-the-moment music exists in a continuum stretching back decades... nevertheless it sounds unlike anything that's come before.

Ranging from resolute floor-fillers like Busy Earnin', Time and Julia to moody burners like Accelerator, Drops and Platoon, Jungle imbue everything here with a sense of gravity and physicality. There's a deeply haunting nature running through these atmospheric reveries to the night. In effect, its a stone cold masterpiece. This crew are more than suited to take this sound screaming into the future, and I'm awaiting their next record more anxiously than any other. These are the things that dreams are made of.

1. Whereas before it was disco's method, its production techniques that were taken on board by the post punks: artists like PIL ejected the sunshine and engulfed their tracks in pure dread. Even The Human League were still making righteously strange synth music at this point - see 1980's Travelogue - at times Moroder-inflected yet stark and severe, with the full-on pop of Dare! still a year away.

2. Levan's Paradise Garage of course a haven for this sort of lush, sun-kissed boogie.

3. Rather appropriately, the sleeve for The World Of Arthur Russell depicts the bottom of a swimming pool (Let's Go Swimming!).

4. 1 In 8 just might be my favorite thing here. For whatever reason, its pristine geometric architecture has always reminded me of Octave One.

5. In fact, I've always thought that Basic Channel had already nailed the sound with Maurizio's M4 and Round Two's New Day, which both saw release in 1995.