Although it’s impossible for LWE to cover all dance music genres as thoroughly as we’d like, we do our best to to cover as much ground as possible. To aid in this effort, we’re looking for one good disco reviewer. The genre and its many related sub-genres are as relevant than ever and we’re looking […]
disco
Bottin, Horror Disco
As if names and nationalities really meant something, Italian producer William (Guglielmo) Bottin’s Horror Disco erects a monolithic mass of exceptionally crafted and intricate Italo-disco that might not send you shrieking into the night, but most certainly horrifies — in some sense of the word. While its obvious historical lineage begins with the oft-intertwined horror movies and disco of late-70s Italy (Ã la Claudio Simonetti), the conception of Horror Disco was largely the result of a chance encounter with a vintage Italian-made Farfisa Syntorchestra synthesizer that resulted in the title-track and then served as a blueprint for the work as a whole. Essentially a collection of variations, the album’s fourteen tracks, each around five or six minutes long, thematically bring Bottin’s horrific vision to light. It is at times groovy like a Munich Machine, campy like the B-list, and lurid like a Dario Argento film, but never forced, inane, or boring. Horror might be a genre better filmed or written, but with Bottin’s sound it reveals striking dance floor potential.
Still Going, Spaghetti Circus/Untitled Love
On July 12, 1979, during the intermission of a doubleheader between the White Sox and the Detroit Tigers, rock radio DJ Steve Dahl hosted an event called Disco Demolition Derby at Chicago’s Comiskey Park. Amidst cries of “disco sucks!” a seething army of Middle America, fifty thousand strong, participated in the destruction of disco records, culminating in a near-riot and prompting the appearance of police on horseback. Though the myopic, racist, homophobic nature of such an event should be glaringly obvious, the likes of Dahl have had a lasting effect on popular conceptions of dance music, and particularly of disco. Since then, the efforts of those who produce and play disco are often branded with the faddish tag, “revival,” invoking the “day disco died” as an actual fact and a possible recurrence.
Little White Earbuds Interviews Lindstrøm
When Hans-Peter Lindstrøm abdicated the cosmic disco throne a couple years ago, his admirers (including myself) wondered where the Norwegian producer’s sound would end up. Lindstrøm documented his sonic travels and brought listeners along for his second album, Where You Go I Go To. Knowing that he wouldn’t stay in one aural place for long, I asked where he was going next when he stopped in Chicago for a show. Lindstrøm filled me in about what it was like to win a Norwegian Grammy, his collaboration with Solale, and the future of his sound.