Cerrone - Supernature

For the video, really; though disco is creeping back into my playlists...

More mice-men in videos please!

And more Rolls Royces!

Donna Summer - Wasted

Keep turning back to this song... she just sings the word 'wasted' so perfectly... perhaps not the 'wasted' she intended or I mean but this transcends individual wasteds and ends up meaning them all; the odd little thereminish solo doesn't hinder her any either... and the beats are so gloopy...

Cher's Gaze Of The Other

From the disco-tastic, Sophie Ellis Bextor-baiting days of 1979... Cher reinvents herself as a Flesh Gordon extra for this album cover... the music is light discofunk and can't hope to match the lunatic genius of the album art...

Whenever I think about Sartre's gaze of the other, I think about this and shudder.

New Genres

My Top 11 favourite new genres for Christmas 2010:

Gurgle-fi - The sound of an R&B compilation drowning; water filling up the crevices between the road and the Hummer; the slowed-down, slur of a waterboarded Usher, kept by the Moonies...

Ratchet (sometimes Asp, or Asperger's)- wiry, three-step, instrumental techno with a massive filtered sidesweep of massed Cdskip choirs and a 'Parmegianian' rhythmic reluctance. True Ratchet should begin with EQ'd mumblings and end with the Tin Man falling down concrete stairs.

urlingPop - the small 'u' is crucial. Otherwise, pop.

Faunrock - aggressive panpipes, a re-imagined Comus. Faunrock is normally acoustic, with volume crucial but dependent on singing bowl amplification or massed playing. Slightly fascist leanings, vigorously denied. "Faunrock is Panic. Faunrock is Hansel and Gretel. Faunrock opens the harts of the wuds. Faunrock smiles like a slashed face" (from The Faunrock Manifesto)

Relentless - Gabba techno played by string quartets. Increasingly popular at weddings. Began as a postmodern joke and quickly became popular. Social cryptoamnesia at work. Sometimes foul.

Smirk-hop - If beats could be insincere, they'd smirk.

Kohl - The soundtrack to self-harming rituals, guitarless, beatless, yet propulsive proto-shoegaze. Kohl tracks are generally ten minutes or more long with a gradually increasingly tempo, building up a head of oily black steam.

Sliphop - Anticon artists heard through a cardboard tube.

Cthulhop - Dark, unsettling, multi-tentacled, sample-heavy instrumental hiphop. Samples on samples. Depth is all. Only remotely comprehensible on headphones. Cthulhop albums generally have a complete list of (mostly uncleared) samples and literary/film references on the sleeves, often stretching to 5000 words or more.

Yellowbelly - Half-hearted attempts at defunct genres of all kinds, played for laughs. The Barron Knights take on Goth, Gangsta-rap, Punk, Postpunk, Electro etc. Music for people who hate music.

Krave - hardcore for people who have no clue of the score. Or even that there is a score. Or even that a score is a theoretical possibility.

Then...

Just after posting about my disco-demons below, I was looking for these, after seeing some of this person's work in, er, Mixmag...






When I came across this.

Disc(l)ocations

I don't choose music these days. It chooses me. I'm temporarily without CD or Record player. Trapped in a room with just a little black box* and a big iPod on shuffle. I load it up and it chooses the mood, decides on which kind of day it is. I'm learning to live with it, learning not to press on through the tracks, learning to believe that, if I've put it on there, it must be worth listening to all the way through.

Mostly, there's a tangle of sounds. Mostly, there's no rhyme nor reason - The Chesterfields to Ramleh to Fourt Tet to the soundtrack to Barry Lydon - but occasionally it gets a feel for things. Sometimes, there's something in the air. Yesterday, shuffle had an odd liking for the new Kempernorton EP (and in some Jungian synchronicity / complete coincidence, I found the Iron John book in a Glastonbury second-hand shop the same day) and various Pantha Du Prince tracks (of more in a later post perhaps; I've come to this guy late but it's stirring, interesting stuff) and today, apropos of nothing (so far), it's got a disco head on.

It's quite relentless.

There's been the odd bit of Patrick Cowley, some Ze stuff and, especially, Giorgio Moroder. In fact, out of the tens of thousands** of tracks it could choose, more or less all of them have a disco twist (over 15 songs played so far today, all but three have been disco). I can't get a fix on it. There's clearly disco in the air, the tranciest kind. The kind that keeps going. The day doesn't feel disco but I can't escape the sense that maybe it'll become so. There's a few hours left. It's out there, trying to get in. It's insistent music at the best of times. It's trying to get into my bones.

Giorgio Moroder - The Chase

Giorgio Moroder - First Hand Experience In Second Hand Love




*I might mean this. I can't be sure. Wasn't this in Rapid Eye or something?

**Maybe the iPod is trying to comment on the obscenity of having this much music on your person at any one time, maybe it's making a comment about the implied self-denial of Free Will, maybe something's just missing a time when the best bit of any journey was deciding which tapes to take with you...


UPDATE - I think this may be responsible. I'm looking into it.