disco
Barney Harsent
The EU referendum isn’t the only thing causing polarised opinion over European issues. The question of what constitutes Balearic Beat looms large over the music community. For some, it’s a fixed point, namely celebrated DJ Alfredo’s record box in the mid-80s. For others it’s built on more shifting sands, a sentiment DJ and author Bill Brewster summarises with trademark élan: “Balearic Beat today is the same as it was in 2011, 1999 and 1984. It’s shit pop records and brilliant EBM records. It’s everything and nothing.”International Feel record label boss and producer Mark Barrott’s take is Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Before the resurgence in vinyl, and the resultant pursuit of audiophile perfection on pointlessly expensive sound systems, was the musician’s fetish for vintage equipment and analogue synths. Live, this makes sense: sounds go direct into the audience's ear, air its only conduit. After the painstaking pathway that most recorded music has to take – downloaded onto a phone and compressed to flux through headphones made entirely out of snidely weighted plastic reputations – you wonder why they’d bother. Generator, the second album from Berlin-based producer Rodion, shows exactly why, boasting a Read more ...
Joe Muggs
The deadpan duo of Tennant and Lowe have never been easy to suss out at the best of times: maybe their way of layering wackiness on deep seriousness, eyebrow-flickering subtlety on roaring camp, giddy frivolity on erudition, has been their way of staying fresh. The Gilbert & George of British pop, they live to perplex even into middle age and beyond. But even given all that, quite what they're doing starting an album with “Happiness”, a hokey country and western hoedown mixed into the thumping EDM of modern American raves – sounding like Major Lazer going crazy on the chewin' tobacco – is Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Disco was about the dancefloor: a music that delivered the goods in one-song bursts which made assembled revellers move. The album was not its natural home. Of course, the compilation thrives and albums with side-long tracks hit the right note, but an album entirely dedicated to disco by a single artist would struggle to have the impact of a single, killer cut. Jimmy Somerville’s Homage is, then, a brave release. The album is his tribute to the music he grew up with and which had always been an influence. It is his disco album.Somerville has always explicitly acknowledged the influence. The Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
With just over two weeks to Christmas, thoughts might be turning to which of the deluge of 2014’s reissues might be suitable as a gift, worth putting on your own wish-list for Santa or even merit buying for yourself. So if help is needed, theartsdesk is happy to provide a one-stop guide to the essential reissues covered so far this year.Normal service will resume next week with a look at John Grant’s old band The Czars. The week after we will consider Millions Like Us, a box set dedicated to, as it is helpfully subtitled, “the Mod Revival 1977–89”. Following that will be a collection Read more ...
Barney Harsent
There is a tradition in oral storytelling of individual embellishments and flourishes, of one tale taking many forms – the more it is told, the finer the detail. Characters are added and the narrative extended. In this way, stories stand up to near endless repetition for they always have something new to offer us, there is always something new to learn.Sadly, The Story of Funk: One Nation Under a Groove is not one of these stories. As soon as the titles had rolled, we were told, again, how James Brown invented the funk. We heard, for the umpteenth time, of Sly Stone’s daring pairing of funk Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The National Theatre's new Dorfman auditorium gets off to a kick-ass start with Here Lies Love, the Off Broadway musical transplant that does for the closing months of Nicholas Hytner's tenure as artistic director what Jerry Springer the Opera did for the early days of his regime a decade or more ago. An ongoing hit at New York's Public Theatre, David Byrne's maiden foray into the often-treacherous waters of musical theatre remains an experiential triumph, its undeniable kitsch factor wedded throughout to a witty, sometimes wounding trawl through the life and disco-intensive times of none Read more ...
Joe Muggs
It's rare that you can trace a genre to one man. But house music is well documented: “house” originally simply meant the music played at the Warehouse club, by one Frankie Knuckles, who died yesterday in Chicago from diabetes-related complications. Knuckles was a disciple of New York disco, who'd served his DJ apprenticeship in the city's spectacularly decadent gay bathhouses in the mid-Seventies as an understudy of Larry Levan (who would set up the Paradise Garage, which itself gave its name to another genre – garage).Seeking a club where he could have complete creative freedom, he moved to Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Kerri Chandler is quite simply one of the most revered figures in dance music, as much now as when he emerged from the New Jersey club scene onto the international stage nigh on a quarter of a century ago. True to the spirit of the disco, he has only ever released three albums in that time, but has made over 100 12” singles, and maybe twice that number of remixes of other people's work, as well as untold performances as one of the most consistently popular DJs in house music.His style is exceptionally musical, taking rich influences from soul and jazz and heavy on the use of “real” Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Queer as Pop (****) was as much about social as musical history, and Nick Vaughan-Smith’s film told its story with a combination of outstanding archive material and some incisive interviewees, the archive taking fractionally more of the weight. Subtitled “From the Gay Scene to the Mainstream”, it started loosely in the Sixties, then jumped back and forth across the Atlantic until the present day as the story demanded.It started from the premise that gay clubs were the places that played the best music, and that it was gay artists who were pushing the stylistic boundaries, which were then duly Read more ...
Joe Muggs
The thought of attending a dance music conference in Amsterdam frankly gave me the creeping horrors. I'd never been to Amsterdam Dance Event before, and the combination of DJ egos, business hustling and relentless partying through hundreds of club venues in a renownedly liberal city presented so many opportunities for both boredom and complete catastrophe, it just seemed like a fool's errand. But this, of course, wasn't fair. The dance music business is far more interesting than rumour and memories of the ego-bloated nineties superclub era would have it, and Amsterdam is a delightful place to Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Giorgio Moroder: Schlagermoroder Volume 1 1966-1975 / On the Groove Train Volume 1 1975-1993 / On the Groove Train Volume 2 1974-1985 / Son of my FatherSo far, this year has been good for Giorgio Moroder. He’s been integral to Daft Punk’s world-conquering Random Access Memories. “I Feel Love”, the timeless, pulsing synth-dance fantasia he fashioned for Donna Summer, opened the Liberace biopic Behind the Candelabra. At once, he’s evocative of a particular era and his influence is shaping the contemporary. The voyage through these seven CDs (three doubles and a single) shows how hard he’s Read more ...