Disco Horror

It’s extremely well-established that we here at Disco Horror are unabashed fans of all things Scandinavian- especially if we’re talking disco. And with incredible releases from acts like the Meanderthals, Mungolian Jet Set, and L&PT themselves, this year has been something of a renaissance for dudes like us. But sometimes other deserving artists can get overlooked in the process, and until recently (for me) Bjørn Torske was one of those artists.

I had always enjoyed Torske’s 2007 album Feil Knapp, but for some reason never investigated any further. But after hearing both his 2008 single “Kokt Kveite” and stellar remix of Lindstrøm’s “The Contemporary Fix” on Prins Thomas’ Live at Robert Johnson mix (the latter was also featured here on this very blog earlier in the year), I decided to stop being lazy and check out the rest of the guy’s music. It turns out that Torske has been recording in Norway since the early ’90s- making his own productions, frequently collaborating with Rune Lindbaek (Meanderthals), doing remixes and starting multiple record labels.

While I couldn’t track down any of those old Lindbaek collaborations, I did discover a wealth of amazing remixes and 12″ cuts that might even impress more than anything Torske put on his proper albums. Along with his inimitable remix of Sunburned Hand of the Man’s “The Parakeet Beat” (which I will eventually post to the blog as well), my favorite ‘discovery’ was Torske’s Kan Jeg Slippe? EP from last year. The title track is a flute-y forest seance that slowly gets subverted by  shambling bongos and sinister atmospherics, all the while subtly turning into a full-on hippie-disco freakout sometime within it’s sixteen-minute duration. “Kan Jeg Slippe?” proves to be worthy of it’s epic length; not unlike the best Mungolian Jet Set remixes or anything Lindstrøm or Prins Thomas have produced in the last year, the track has a way of always noodling yet staying rooted to irresistibly heavy percussion throughout. Enjøy!

Bjørn Torske – Kan Jeg Slippe?

We return from our week-long absence here at Disco Horror to bring you a trifecta of recent down-tempo house favorites, each constructed with a solid foundation of dance-floor friendly grooves and tastefully ornamented with melancholic vocal samples to create some of the finest contemporary tune-architecture in the biz.

Floating Points- aka Sam Shepard- has been deservedly receiving much attention for his latest release- the ‘Love Me Like This’ 12-inch on R2 Records. Borrowing heavily from Real to Reel’s track of the same name, the title track applies the slo-mo disco treatment to the original with brilliant results. The one that’s making the rounds on the interweb right now is the original mix, but it’s the vinyl-only ‘Radio Mix’ that has been getting all the plays at my house lately. The ‘Radio Mix’ utilizes the Real to Reel track’s vocals in more instantly-gratifying ways, and the result is slightly less Mark E and slightly more vintage Levan. But only slightly.

Floating Points – Love Me Like This (Radio Version)

New Orleans-based artist Walter Jones has recently made the jump from the German label Supersoul to perennial Disco Horror favorite DFA Records, and to mark the occasion they’ve put out the man’s fantastic new twelve-inch ‘I’ll Keep On Loving You’. Other blogs are flipping out over the b-side “Living Without Your Love,” which is a great tune, don’t get me wrong, but I actually prefer the title track if given the choice. Featuring muted synth lines and some heavily filtered vocal snippets from Jones himself, the sound here lands somewhere between current italo-revivalists like Bogdan Irkuk or Johan Agebjörn and the Detroit-style disco-house edits of Theo Parrish. Which is some pretty incredible territory to land yourself in, as it turns out.

Walter Jones – I’ll Keep On Loving You

Finally, we have a new tune for you from one of my favorite modern producers- Hamburg’s Marco Niemerski, better known as Tensnake. Rising to my radar with his awesome ‘Keep Believin’ EP on Endless Flight and a slough of ace remixes, Tensnake recently cemented his place in my heart with the ‘In the End (I Want To Cry)’ twelve-inch on Running Back. As usual, all of the tracks on the EP are more than worthy of your time, varying in style from more straightforward techno productions to stylish nu-balearica to glitzy disco-house jams. However, (yet again) it’s the title track here that stands out the most, nicely sequencing all of those elements into another exemplary filter-disco showcase.

Tensnake – In the End (I Want To Cry)

Shameless re-edits of popular tunes tend to really piss-off certain types of people, but ‘shameless’ is a concept we tend to whole-heartedly embrace around these corners of the interweb. So today I bring you two re-workings/re-edits/re-mixes/what have you, both with rockin’ FM hits as their source material.

Rove Dogs are a French edits duo who recently released the first EP in the Small Time Cuts series, which contains two disco tracks on the B-side, and this extension of The Eagles’ talk box workout “Those Shoes” on the other. Rove Dogs don’t do much with the song besides let that coked-up groove play out for a few minutes longer than the original, and in a lot of ways that’s fine by me. This one adheres to the tenets of the school of Terje- basically, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. And unless you agree with the Dude’s assessment of the LA super-group, I think you’ll find that nothing is broke about this one.

Rove Dogs – Dub Shoes

Next up is a reworking by Swedish mega-trio Västkustska Ryggdunkarsällskapet, which consists of the dudes in Tiedye (whose excellent remix of DJ Kaos we posted about just a couple weeks back) and Sankt Goran, who has released material on labels like Bear Funk and Solar Disco. The group released their second EP last year, which contains this funky edit of Tom Petty’s “Don’t Come Around Here No More”. Västkustska are far more liberal with their treatment of this tune, never letting Petty step too far into the picture by erasing both the verses and chorus. They do preserve much of the sitar melody from the original, as well as some “HEY!”s and “GIVE IT UP- STOP!”s, and it makes me seriously question why I never cared about this song in the first place.

Västkustska Ryggdunkarsällskapet – Don’t Dub Around Here No More

After acquiring the new Beautiful Swimmers 12″ that Erik so kindly posted a track and video from, I searched the depths of the internet to find a copy of the previous release on Future Times, a limited 45 of which there are supposedly 300 in existence. It’s no northern soul, but what’s great about it, is that it’s rad NEW music. You can tell this is all produced on machines and it grooves with a synthetic motion, but perhaps that’s the charm that draws me to it. I don’t really know what it is about this track that mesmerizes me, but something about those melodies mechanically spun out with a nervous vibrato over the soft hum of pad synths makes me smile. That may sound lame but this track is endearing in the sense that when you’ve had a bottle of wine on a Tuesday night, this provides the perfect soundtrack to contemplating greater things as you gaze out over the city lights.  Things will be better in future times.

Rhythm Based Lovers – Snow Drift

So first off, welcome to the new site!!! Max has been diligently working on the transition from blogger to the clearly radder wordpress format and we are in the midst of a redesign to make Disco Horror the best disco music/horror movie blog in the world!

I’ve been lax about posting lately and while I have some new vinyl waiting on deck I thought I’d share some rad italo videos I’ve come upon recently and not so recently because they are, as described above, rad.  Particularly, these stick to a cosmic/robot theme, with one straying example that falls merely under the “bizarrely awesome” category.

First up is this amazing video of Dee D. Jackson’s ”Automatic Lover” from 1978.  The days were simpler then, Daft Punk had yet to set the benchmark for robot fashion, and there’s something endearing about a woman in a purple space suit, wrapped in a silver dracula cape lamenting to her foil-rapped robot lover how the romanticism of love has been programmed away.  See me feel me hear love me… I am the automatic lover.

Dee D. Jackson “Automatic Lover” (1978)

Fast forward thirty years to this incredible video to Johan Agebjorn’s “Spacer Woman From Mars” featuring Swedish nu-italo queen Sally Shapiro. Chopped and screwed, Jane Fonda has never looked hotter than when Agebjorn’s synths are unwinding behind her as she floats through the brilliant space odyssey Barbarella, battling all the disco maniacs.

Johan Agebjorn “Spacer Woman From Mars (feat. Sally Shapiro)” (2008)

Now let’s move into the animated realm. I hope most of you have heard/seen this, but I felt it necessary to share just in case you havent. This was one of the first italo songs I ever heard and it’s still one of my favorites. La Bionda’s “I Wanna Be Your Lover” puts Rondo Veneziano’s “La Serinissima” to shame, cuz really how can you compete with two Italian dudes battling space monsters as they are drawn into trap after trap by the siren like calls of a beautiful space she-ghost. Fuck robots in baroque fashion getting beamed up amidst a flooded planet, this is the real robot space animated video.

La Bionda “I Wanna Be Your Lover” (1980)

Lastly, we have the outsider in the group but we’ve come full circle in space and time, back to 1978. There are no robots in this one. Just a lot of awesome still shots spliced together, weird masks, colorful drums in the desert, and a Rolls Royce. Bizarrre characters amidst the deserts and wild jungles after a nuclear holocaust or maybe just medical experiments gone wrong, freed from their sterile prison by Jean-Marc Cerrone’s brilliant production.

Cerrone “Supernature” (1978)

NOTE: BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN, USING HIS EMAIL ADDRES “DCMANOTICE” PERSONALLY CONTACTED US TO ASK US TO TAKE DOWN THIS POST–I THOUGHT THAT WAS PRETTY “SHITTY” IN THE BAD WAY–BUT HE TOOK IT DOWN ANYWAY. AND NOW I CAN’T FIND THE FINAL VERSION. SO YOU’LL HAVE TO JUST DEAL WITH READING THIS SHITTY FIRST DRAFT. THANKS A LOT “COPYRIGHT LAW.”

SECOND NOTE: MY BEST FRIEND KIERAN SAVED THE POST!! HERE IS THE NOW-INFAMOUS DISCO HORROR MEMORIAL BLOGSPOT DAY POST, REPRODUCED BELOW UNEDITED–SARAH CRACKNELL DONT YOU DARE FUCK WITH US.

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Well, yesterday was my favorite holiday, Memorial Day, which is The Official Start Of The Summer, as decreed by basically everyone, and also The Day When Various Media Personalities Hector Us All About All The Dead Troops, as decreed by Various Media Personalities, who, desperate to be seen as Upstanding, Troop-Loving Types, talk about people making “The Ultimate Sacrifice For Your Country” a.k.a. “Dying In Iraq/Afghanistan Due To The Muslims” basically nonstop, especially on NPR, and really, NPR, who are you fooling, you fucking commies, I just want to listen to Car Talk.

How did you guys celebrate? If I know my reading audience well, I imagine that the Americans among you spent the day slack-jawed, hunched at your Macbooks, playing/masturbating to some kind of World of Warcraft/pornography hybrid, while our two or three British fans had tea on the barbie and saluted the Queen. I personally memorialized the Troops and the September 11ths and the George Washingtons by eating a hamburger made from red meat, helping contribute to my Classic American Impotence and Heart Disease, and listening to R. Kelly. Major League Baseball celebrated the blood sacrifice of thousands of nineteen-year-olds by holding Fred Durst Day, where every ballplayer was forced to wear a red hat, presumably symbolizing the color of Valentine’s Day cards, which the troops sent to their “sweethearts.”

The real question is: what America-loving music did you listen to? Given that most people who read this blog are dance music fans, and therefore closeted gays, and therefore terrorists making suicide attacks on marriage, you probably spent the day listening to “The Internationale (Osama Remix)” and Elton John. Fear not, though—as part of Disco Horror’s service to this country, I’m going to provide you with two truly America-loving songs.

The first is “Born in the U.S.A. (Dub Mix),” by the all-time America-lover Bruce Springsteen. Springsteen wrote this song as a tribute to the fact that God had blessed him by not making him an immigrant, and as a celebration of our country’s Greatest War (Vietnam). And I know what you’re going to say! “Max, this is some kind of un-American remix! What would the founding fathers think if, for example, you remixed the constitution!” Folks: this is a “dub mix,” which is the least gay/unamerican of all mixes, so please don’t worry.

Bruce Springsteen – Born in the U.S.A. (Dub Mix)

The other track is the terrific capitalist anthem “I Buy American Records,” by the band “St. Etienne” (what could be more American than a God-fearing band who names themselves after a religious figure??). This track is all about stimulating the American economy by buying records—a terrific message for a difficult time.

St. Etienne – I Buy American Records

Cross-posted at Mind Grapes

Fear The Beard Mix

Jacques Renault – Bad Skinned Effect // RVNG
Manfred Mann’s Earth Band – Please Mrs. Henry // Polydor
Hell Vice – Crawfish (Pilooski Edit) // Dark & Lovely
Soft Rocks – Slowdown // Soft Rocks
L.E.B. Harmony – Feeling Love // Elaste
Dexter Wansel – Martian Mirrorball (Oswego Music Edit) // Beard Science
Mighty Pope – Sweet Blindness // Warner Bros.
Gordon’s War – The Rock Is Gonna Get You // Rusty’s Dusty Disco
Douglas Sound – Do Right // Wurst
C. Denner – Not The Indian // Moxie
Loud-E – Y.O.Y. // Ambassador’s Reception
Bonar Bradberry – Tumbledown // Mindless Boogie
Jackmaster Dahle – Vesuvio (Prinsens Disko Deluxe) // Full Pupp
Mudd & Pollard – Scaffold // Claremont 56
Nite Jewel – Artificial Intelligence // Gloriette Records

Cross-posted at Mind Grapes

This song also has a dope video fyi.