Red Herring Disco

Posted on | August 14, 2008 |

I’ve been stealing free minutes here and there all week, digging through my music library in an effort to put together some semblance of a cohesive set for The Kitchen on Saturday. Although the patio party is billed as a disco affair, my early set is shaping up to be something more like brown-leather, sweat and dirt than silver-sequins, perfume and strings. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that I’m spending far too many hours in front of a computer this summer, but lately I’ve been predisposed to music that’s either full of fantasy (Alex Moulton, Lindstrom) or marked by a healthy amount of grit (Lee Perry, DJ Harvey mixes). Whatever the case, I’m going to try and make sense of it on the decks. A few things I’m feeling…

Vangelis: Let it Happen (Beatfanatic’s remix). Beatfanatics add some, well, beats to the original culled from Vangelis’ Earth. But it’s all done very tastefully and it just plain works, giving the track some momentum and drive that it previously lacked (the original tune floats dangerously close to the hippie ether). All you need is love on the wheel of life, baby.

Yearbook 1 wants to be played on a beach. At sunrise.

Studio: Yearbook 1. Studio is old news to most of the heads, I’m sure. I gave Yearbook 1 the “iTunes Scroll-Thru Listen” last year and it didn’t make much of an impression. Then somehow it ended up being the only music on my work laptop for about a week. By necessity, I listened to the album several times over the course of that week and it finally clicked. “Origin”, “West Side” and “Life’s a Beach”, in particular, are brilliant.

Pastrami Boys: Whole Lotta Love. Yeah yeah, everybody’s tired of edits and blah, blah, blah. Whatever, this tune smokes. It’s an Idjut Boys edit of Tina Turner covering Whole Lotta Love. Slow burning and supremely funky, the “edit” here involves little more than slightly extending a couple of breaks and giving the DJ a little instrumental flourish at the end of the tune (the original just fades out). The brilliant build-up and vocal is thankfully left intact; nice one Idjuts.

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