Currently residing in Frankfurt at the moment on a work related trip. This city is the antithesis of my current home in Berlin; everything is clean, people wear suits and business is booming………..boring in a nutshell.
Luckily me not being drawn to the sites of Germanys finnancial capital leaves me with alot of spare time to sift through my itunes and find some little gems that I had downloaded but not listened to, and what a gem I found!
Zig zag are a wonderful little band from Canada I believe (if discogs serves me right) who released a self titled record some time in the disco era (I’m not one for dates plus the information is irrelevant). The whole collection is a really nice mix of the best bits of disco; a splash of horns here, a synth WOOSH there and a wonderful clean drum and percussion sound which is the key to any classic disco record being regarded as remotely DJ-able in the resurgence going on currently.
Every track here is really good, but for the choice to post I’m going to go on innuendo alone and chose the track entitled “Gay’o.” Its a great repetitive groove with a clear African element to the arrangement. The Lads are chanting and grunting while a chord change allows for the sultry female vocal to punch in with a “SSSSSssssexxxy” form time to time. I don’t know how much fun a woman would be having in a song called “Gay’o” perhaps she is somewhere in between a epic fag hag and a nymphomaniac. We can only wonder.
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Everyone and there mother LOVES Chic. Ok, admittedly they are awesome and they probably wrote 80% of pop music created in the 70′s and 80′s. But spare a thought for poor ol’ Change. These guys are one of the most underrated bands to be around in the disco scene during the first half of the 80s. They created catchy, smooth and polished disco but noone seems to give a shit…
Noone that is except for THE REVENGE (crazy name). The Revenge (AKA Graeme Clark) began producing in his early teenage years, making a skewed blend of electronic music using a couple of his dad’s old drum machines and a sampler. Influenced by his parents collection of rock, soul and funk aswell as eighties daytime radio and the burgeoning rave scene, he began the process of dissecting and re-imagining the music. Here is Change‘s 1983 hit “Don’t Wait Another Night” reworked by The Revenge. Enjoy!
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Maybe we should make every Sunday the obligatory youtube video post cause we are so hungover that writing banter that is witty its too much of a strain?
Just a little insight into the depths of my hangover there. But here is an amazing video by Geneva Jacuzzi. Love caboose is the name of the song, its classic and unashamedly retro
I was given the pleasure of listening to DJ Harveys essential mix on BBC radio1 the other day. If you haven’t had a chance to then I can’t recommend it enough; its a rather eclectic journey through more music styles than the contents of your local charity store and seems to go on forever.
Among the plethora of musical loveliness my ear was tingling at an old ditty that I had yet to hear from a rather surprising, once I discovered the culprit, source. Toto, as in RAIN DOWN I AAAAAAFRICAAAAA, made this rather classic sounding lounge-y song in 1979 on their debut, the imaginatively titled “Toto.” The song, entitled “Georgie Porgy,” ranks up their with one of the worst names ever; taking its name from an old nursery rhyme. In other hands this could be a mess but the sheer straight-faced unironicness of Toto works to their advantage to write a song with this basic premise ,a story of a man desperately in Love and doomed to heartache. Its everything we want in a song about longing – the sound makes us think of rainy nights looking through your window, hoping for your lover to appear with a ghetto blaster playing Peter Gabriel regardless of the electrical dangers in doing such an act. As the summer comes to an end, we all need a little bit of rainy day music to occupy our days and this should definitely be added to your play list.
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Discovered this on Dixon’s RA podcast from 2007. The podcast combines soulful vocals with deep house to a dazzling effect and really deserves a blog post all to itself. This track “Lonnie’s Secret” by Denmark’s Owusu & Hannibal is super super smooth combining honey sweet vocals with a pulsing groove. I had never heard of them before but I’m so glad I found them. It’s from their album “Living With“. Electronica for the soul.
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Credit to my friend in Glasgow who had this video on his facbeook. Ive been tranfixed by it; its a hypnotic sexual groove from africa that seems to be about 3 songs playing at once at different times but somehow works. I think I’ll be discovering more of this style.
This song makes me wistful. It makes me feel nostalgic for a childhood in the 70s that I never had. It’s the soundtrack to a utopian afterparty where everything is in soft focus and noone needs to wear sunglasses. It’s all kinds of dreamy…Toby Tobias of Rekids label is the guy behind it. It’s from his 2008 album Space Shuffle, a mix of cosmic ambient disco and soulful techno that jitters and glides across the musical spectrum. Swoon.
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A really rather good track i got sent the other day which contains a noise that I am always envious of. Erik Wikstrom’s “Marathon” has a great stabbing saw synth which permeates the whole track and gives a real thud of rythm that makes the whole thing impossibly groovy. What is it about the Scandinavians, he is Swedish, and their ability to make some amazing, disco tinged, comtempary classics? Im unsure as I have yet to visit; lets make wide ignorant assumptions and blame it on the retro 60s design of ikea or something.
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Stafford the county town of Staffordshire, England is a place I know nothing about. Wikipedia tells me its been descibed as “an ancient borough and market town, celebrated for the manufacture of shoes”….oh and its also the birthplace of Fran Healy, the frontman of pop rockers Travis. Wonderful.
Its also, however, where some of the main members of Chicken Lips hail from. These purveyors of electronic funk have been around for years and have just released Show Your Shape (The Best Of Chicken Lips) on London’s Tirk records as well as their own Lipservice label. The album contains a selection of their tracks from various LPs throughout the years plus a few unreleased extras for all the anoraks out there. Two of the founding members of Chicken Lips, Andrew Meecham and Dean Meredith, made up early nineties dance act Bizarre Inc and seemingly they’ve remixed everyone in the entire world. So they probably know a thing or two about music production. Readers of a certain age may remember their massive 1992 hit I’m Gonna Get You (I don’t I’m far too young). That song seems like a bit of a relic at this point but it’s interesting to compare it with their new funk oriented direction.
They’ve promised their fourth album in late 2010 but for now take a dip into a selection of the Lips productions from the last 10 years. They’re quite good…and a little bit bonkers.
This is perhaps a bit cheeky of me. I was told of an amazing song by our newest collaborator Ciaran on Sunday during a mutual hangover sunday. Its a new E.P. on Editainment by an artist called “Cleo and patra” which I assume is a made up name since the previous releases were by “Tiger and Woods“.
The song in question was called “Walk like an egyptian” and is a rather nifty bootleg of the Rockers revenge classic “Walking on sunshine” and the techno floor filler “Timecode” by Justin Kohncke.
I can’t remember the last time I got excited by a bootleg, probably while doing a wagon jump on the 2manyDJs compilation, when I was but a bedraggled sideburned proto-gay back in my home town of Greenock. This is an unusual pairing but one that works astonishingly and really changes the feel of both tracks. Timecode is forced kicking and screaming into the pop realm when walking on sunshine is sedated to a clinical alternative piece.
Alas, the release is, for now, vinyl only so for all you who dont “dooooo” vinyl I remade it as best I could from the 30 second clip on juno. enjoy
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Currently residing in Frankfurt at the moment on a work related trip. This city is the antithesis of my current home in Berlin; everything is clean, people wear suits and business is booming………..boring in a nutshell.
I was given the pleasure of listening to DJ Harveys essential mix on BBC radio1 the other day. If you haven’t had a chance to then I can’t recommend it enough; its a rather eclectic journey through more music styles than the contents of your local charity store and seems to go on forever.
