Disco Horror

As I like to remind people who I know or meet on busses, my alma mater—Occidental College—was at one point home to literally thousands of important celebrities, including Barack Obama, Ben Affleck, Luke Wilson, The Guy From The Scissor Sisters, Jack Kemp, Terry Gilliam, and Jimmy’s Cousin. None of them seem to have actually graduated from Oxy, except for Jimmy’s cousin, but, you know, who cares. Here’s a question—how many current Presidents of the United States went to “Yale”? None. How many went to Oxy? All of them.

Anyway I’m just BRAGGIN to bring up Los Angeles recording artist NITE JEWEL, aka Ramona Gonzalez, Oxy class of ’09. I had a chance to talk with Ramona a couple weeks ago when she was in New York—she’s really nice and working on a thesis about HEIDEGGER, who is a famous “philosopher”—and wrote it up for Anthem.

I think Jimmy & I discovered Nite Jewel via our ongoing Italians Do It Better standom (Ramona’s put out a couple 12”s there after getting in touch with Johnny Jewel on MySpace), and she’s definitely got that IDIB bedroom disco feel—late-night music, a little woozy, a little dark. But even more than disco what I hear in her music is Freestyle, or “Latin Hip Hop,” the disco-electro-rap-whatever that was all over urban radio for a few years in the mid-80s. Obviously not exactly (she’s not, like, a Lisa Lisa)—but maybe her music bears the same relationship to Freestyle that Johnny Jewel’s does to Italo—a dusty shadow of a once-popular sound, now consigned to budget bins and collectors’ crates and hard drives and sad little blogs. It’s a terrific, evocative sound, and Ramona does an incredible job of maintaining that sort of bittersweet nostalgia across the entire album.

I was going to say that today (in New York, where it’s raining), is the perfect kind of day to listen to Nite Jewel, but I’m not sure that’s quite right—there’s something specifically and intensely sort of Angeleno about her music, something I’m not sure I can put my finger on, but something that means despite its dusty memory-geared wistfulness, it’s not a rainy-day album: I would argue, instead, that it’s a smoggy-day album, music for carbon monoxide haze.

In any event, I’m not a freestyle expert by any means (for that you should check out this great blog, which is where I probably got the tracks I’m posting!), but I am going to declare today “Freestyle Friday” on Disco Horror, and leave you with a couple jams to help you greet the weekend. I don’t know enough about the acts or the music to properly introduce them to you—and yet somehow I think they’ll speak for themselves.

An interesting thing happened yesterday, I had a track taken down and Blogger sent me a notice saying it had been in violation of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA). The track was Tom Croose‘s edit of Fleetwood Mac’s “Never Going Back Again.” I don’t know what brought this on, whether it was the Fleetwood Mac tag or what, and the file was removed from divshare too so I guess it wont be up anymore. But in the process of figuring out what was going on I contacted Tom Croose and he said it was totally cool that the track was up (he seems like a really nice dude too). He ended up sending me a few mixes and said more remixes and edits are on the way. Here is a link to his Stoney Baloney Mix recently posted at ISO50 and he is also one half of Worst Friends, a tropical balearic group with a Studio-like feel. I will be sure to keep you informed if his current projects as I find out.

Today we have a track from the first Bumrocks LP, El Bum. Bumrocks is the wonderful site hosted by two Chimneys out of NYC, Andre and Jeremy (one half of Tropical Computer System), that posts obscure gems regularly while hosting tracks from a very respectable list of guest bumrockers, the most recent being the UKs Phoreski. Their new LP features many mysterious tracks and reworks by a number of people ranging across proto-techno, disco, and more ambient downtempo textures. Our very own local vinyl guru The Beat Broker appears on the LP so I only found it fitting to share with you his masterful dub of Jeanne Shy’s “Night Dancer“. Enjoy this and check out the album here or I’m sure they have it down at Amoeba, it’s worth every penny for those of you with a taste for the obscure.

For a change of pace I’ve been listening to a ton of Italians Do It Better recently because Johnny Jewel is truly a genius with the production skills. Maybe it’s because it’s the perfect soundtrack for my walks to the train every morning in the melancholy San Francisco weather. Either way I have two tracks for you today from IDIB and you can track down a third soon-to-be-released dark synth masterpiece on ARAWA by newcomer Twisted Wires here. For now I have new/old Glass Candy off their new Deep Gems: Singles, B-sides, and Rarities which is basically some unreleased tracks, but mostly remixes/alternate versions of tracks off of their amazing album B/E/A/T/B/O/X. If anything this release is rather dancier than their other stuff, but Ida No’s haunting voice and lyrics still keep the mood wonderfully dark. This is the most dancey of the tracks and sounds similar to the vibe Gang Gang Dance achieve, but Jewel keeps it in his own style. I cannot force I cannot fight, the beat’s alive.

Taking it down a knotch on the energy level, I picked up this 12″ the other day of another IDIB project, Nite Jewel, aka Ramona Gonzalez out of Los Angeles. I heard this a little while back and it spurred me to purchase the 12″ when I saw it. It’s a slow mover with a similar feel to Glass Candy, but a charming walking bassline that keeps your head bouncing. Enjoy!