Those City Nights

Nitefreq

Manny Z — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 21:53:59 +0000

Me and a friend wanted to celebrate the date, 08.08.08, with an event that captured the history of electro, and we quickly realised that the perfect way for us to do this was to theme it around the iconic Roland drum machine released in 1980… the TR-808.

The night takes place at Jacks near London Bridge. Here’s the main room line-up:

808 State
The only band to name themselves after the Roland TR-808, formed in Manchester in 1988, and they’re celebrating 20 years as a band at our 08.08.08 party! With a special DJ set that will no doubt include every classic, both modern and forgotten, and showcasing what influenced them, this should prove to be a landmark session.

I-f
Kingpin of the Cybernetic Broadcasting System and an 808 obsessive, I-f’s knowledge of 808 records and their aesthetic means his contribution to this celebration is invaluable. A prolific producer, his ‘Space Invaders’ hit appeared on his label Viewlexx in 1998 and became a catalyst for the early 2000 electro revival. With an exclusive electro set prepared just for this occasion, this is not to be missed… we’re expecting the ground to open up.

Arthur Baker
Brooklyn 1982: Baker produced two recordings so hot that they started their own genre; with ‘Planet Rock’ and ‘Play At Your Own Risk’ the electro craze started and everyone was popping. Over two and a half decades later, these records are still as devastating as ever. Baker will be marking the 08.08.08 date with an authentic set that journeys back to New York, telling a story of the eclectic sound of that era, from the NYC discos to the sound on the street.

DMX Krew
Ed DMX has released his own style of booty bass and electro on his well established Breakin’ label. From his definitive synth-pop album ’We Are DMX’ to the science funk of ’Collapse Of The Wave Function’ on Rephlex, he’s been at the forefront of our electro exploration. For Nitefreq he will be performing live with a drum-machine club set that promises to be bigger than the bass that ate Miami.

Advance tickets are £12 and can be bought from Warpmart and Seetickets

Jack to the 808!

Jesse Saunders

Manny Z — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 18:40:42 +0000

Z Factor’s 1984 LP, which featured Jesse Saunders, is considered to be the very first house music album. 24 years later it has been reissued and this article looks at the stories behind it’s standout track, ‘Fantasy’, and the track that came after it, ‘On & On’.

I’ve previously written about a couple of early Citinite projects, when I was just thinking of ideas to get my label started, but one of the earliest projects that I had planned was a reissue of the best tracks from the Z Factor album. Z Factor was Vince Lawrence’s group and they had recorded the classic new wave track, ‘(I Like To Do It In) Fast Cars’. (Lawrence went on to found Trax Records with Larry Sherman.) House music pioneer Jesse Saunders joined the group a little while after ‘Fast Cars’, and together they released what was to arguably turn out to be the first house track ever written, ‘Fantasy’.

Back in late 2003 I got in touch with Saunders and he was up for doing the reissue; we were also going to include ‘On & On’ on the record, both the original and an unreleased version from 1984. The original version of ‘On & On’ was written and produced by Saunders just after he wrote ‘Fantasy’. Eventhough ‘Fantasy’ was produced first, ‘On & On’ can claim to be the first house track actually released.

Unfortunately, Saunders didn’t possess any good quality masters of any of the Z Factor album tracks so I tracked down a copy of the original vinyl release, in the hope of using that as a master source. I eventually found a copy on eBay and after an intense round of bidding, won the auction. The auction ended up being talked about on a number of music forums due to the high price that I eventually paid… $615! I think I inadvertently made a bit of history there.

Well, when I eventually got the record it was a bit of a disaster; the quality of the pressing was typical of a lot of the early Chicago records – a thin sound with lots of surface noise – due to the pressing plant’s habit of grinding down old vinyl to re-use. We tried cleaning it up but with little success. Saunders also sent me the unreleased version of ‘On & On’, and whilst this track was pretty amazing, the master also had some kind of interference which would have made it impossible to release without editing it.

I was unwilling to try to track down another copy, so all things considered I decided to drop it and sold my copy of the album (for $600). I kept a recording of it so it wasn’t a complete washout, and shortly afterwards I signed Robert O’Dell to the label, and so Citinite was eventually launched.

Well, today a friend of mine sent me an email; it seems that the Z Factor album is being reissued by another label. The weird part about it is that the label is called Cititrax. When I saw the details of the release, for one or two seconds I thought I’d fallen into some parallel universe, where Citinite was called Cititrax, and I’d released the Z Factor album after all. (And I literally mean that – I actually thought I was in another dimension… I’ve obviously been listening to too many science programmes on the radio.)

Looking at their label’s website it looks like they’ve done a good job, pressing it on 160gsm vinyl, and they’ve even gone to the trouble of printing an insert sheet with the below band photo. The Citinite incarnation wouldn’t have been the full album, only the best tracks, so I guess it’s nice that Cititrax have gone the whole way.

Cititrax

I’d actually gotten as far as putting together a press release with the help of Saunders, mainly consisting of the following interview which was done in 1994 and originally published in Jonathan Fleming’s book, What Kind Of House Party Is This?

Fleming asked Saunders how house music started:
Well, there are two ways to translate that. If you wanna speak of house as the movement, the sounds and the music that we know today, we’re talking about 1983. If you’re talking about what was the catalyst to make it grow to what it finally grew into, then you’ve got to go back to the disco days. But see, there’s a very thin line between what was disco and truly what house is today.

So starting from the beginning, it all transcended from the Warehouse basically, because if my step-brother Wayne Williams hadn’t gone there and heard that music, in turn he would never have taken me there, and we wouldn’t have been able to grow as a company and as a force to forge this music on people and make them listen and believe in it. All I did in 1983 was actually embellish that whole thing and kinda put it together. What we did was gather all the right ingredients, and luckily I was just fortunate enough to be able to take all of that and make it into the sound we know today as house.

I mean, I had to have a vision in order to make something, but really what I was doing was just taking a little o’ this and a little o’ that, a little creativity, and making that one sound that became the first record, which was ‘On & On’. But I can’t take credit for the ingredients, you know, it’s just like making a recipe – you can’t take credit for basil or salt & pepper because they have always been there, you’re just using them to create your recipe, and that’s exactly what I did with disco to make my ‘On & On’, besides the original ‘On & On’ record that already existed.

We’re in 1983, I’m at The Playground DJing, and I mean we open at nine o’clock and we don’t close until the last person leaves which sometimes was seven, eight, nine o’clock in the morning, and when you’re playing that long, you get into a groove but it’s kinda redundant, because there’s only so many things that you can play and you have to kinda keep it going. So what I would do is I would take different kinds of rhythm tracks that I made at home with my 808 drum machine, and basically I would put other records on top of ‘em. A lot of the time I would take the drum machine to the club and just leave it playing the same beat the whole time and just mix things in and out, so it was always constantly the same beat underneath to keep the crowd going, but I would play a different song on top.

There was one record in particular that I used to do this with a lot, which was the original ‘On & On’, which was basically this bootleg record where someone had taken the bassline from ‘Space Invaders’, the “toot-toot, hey, beep-beep” loop of Donna Summer’s ‘Bad Girls’, and the little horn thing in ‘Funky Town’, and looped them all together to make a constant loop for a whole record. This was the b-side of the record. The a-side was a big megamix of ‘Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough’ by Michael Jackson, and that was the side that everyone played.

Now people like Frankie Knuckles, although he had the keenest ear for music and could break records that way, in terms of a real DJ, he couldn’t mix really. His mixing was kinda all over the place. But it wasn’t about the mix with him, it was about the records that he played. But I was all about doing stuff backwards, cutting’ and scratchin’ and the whole nine yards; so basically I was mixing and re-editing records right on the turntables without using tapes and things like that. What I was doing basically was taking the music to a whole different level and a whole new experience of listening to three or four things at one time rather than just one song.

Anyway, like I was saying, everyone was playing the a-side of this record and I just happened to flip it over wondering what was on the b-side, and when I listened to it, it was like “doom doom doom dibi doom doom doom doom, doom doom doom dibi doom doom doom doom” and I was like, “aah damn, that’s a nice groove”. So I was like, “okay, cool, this is cool. I’m gonna try this cut on my crowd”, and when I put it on, they didn’t clear the floor – everybody kinda got into the groove. Then I played it again a little later and more people got on the floor, then I played it again and people started requesting it, so I was like, “cool”. So I had a drum machine going, ‘On & On’ going on one turntable, and I’d be bringing in another record like ‘Planet Rock’, when that came out, on the other turntable.

By this time, I’m doing a lot of guest spots, an hour here, an hour there, and so on and so forth, and also doing like a mix show on WGCI with Herb Kent who got me on the show to begin with. So whenever I played, my first record on the turntable would be this bootleg ‘On & On’ record because that was like my signature tune. When I put that on, everybody knew that I was in the place because nobody else was playing that side but me, no one even knew what it was, and I wouldn’t tell anybody, even though there were a few people that had it. When I would go up on stage I would make sure that security cleared it so that no one would know what it was that I was playing. It was amazing to me that they hadn’t flipped that record over and found it themselves.

Anyway, after about nine or ten months, we had an incident at The Playground where someone broke in and stole some of my records, and ‘On & On’ was one of them that they stole. I was so pissed off ’cause now I didn’t have my signature record and I couldn’t make the crowd go wild the way I used to when I came on. So I was like, “well I’m gonna make one myself”.

You see, my mother is a music major, a music teacher, so I had taken music lessons all through my life. She started me off playing piano. I had flute lessons, trumpet lessons, guitar lessons, drum lessons, the whole nine yards. So basically, DJing to me at that time was just playing records and breaking records, I hadn’t really associated the fact that someone actually writes a song, goes in the studio, records it and then presses it on a record – that never really occurred to me at that time. But by the time I got a drum machine I was thinking maybe I can do a record, because I knew I could play.

That was when those Mattel Synsonic drum machines came out. When I heard about those, that was the first thing I went out and got, so that I could make a beat and do some things with it, and that’s when I wrote this song called ‘Fantasy’, which basically was a concoction of the bassline from the ‘Space Invaders’-'On & On’ thing and the bridge from one of Ronnie Griffith’s songs. The lyrics were all original and I did the string arrangements at home on the piano. I got my mother to go out and get a Korg Poly-61 keyboard and I just kinda used the feel from a lot of the songs and records that I played that were hits to kinda concoct them and embrace them into this one thing, ‘Fantasy’.

I just used to sit up in my den and create songs and different things, and that’s when ‘On & On’ was done, on that Korg Poly-61 keyboard, an 808 drum machine and a TB-303 bassline machine. All of this was recorded on a four track cassette recorder, the same as the original ‘Fantasy’ and all the other stuff that we recorded at Jes Say Records.

Anyway, I was getting ahead of myself; that was the time that I ran into Vince Lawrence. Actually, I had known Vince prior to this from back in the days at Sauer’s when Craig Thompson (who had the finance) and I were promoting parties there. Because Sauer’s was becoming the hot spot, Craig had somehow formulated a deal with the owner and had booked up every Friday and Saturday there for a year. Now, how I met Vince was when he came up to me and told me that he was part of a group that was renting Sauer’s prior to Craig monopolising this deal, and he said to me, “yeah, you all were slick booking up that place – now no one can get in there”. That was our first encounter. After Craig and I had our stint at Sauer’s and we went on to running The Playground, Vince started coming there.

This was about the time that Vince had his ‘Fast Cars’ record. He’d hangout at first, and then he’d try and get me to play his record, but it wouldn’t fit – it just wasn’t the kind of record that I could play… not to say that it was a bad record. I mean it was the first record that he had ever made so naturally a lot of things were loose, but overall for a first attempt it was good and I still worked it and tried to get it into the set and help promote it and the whole nine yards.

Then Vince came to talk to me about this and that and how to make a record – he just had all this knowledge of, like, making records because his father Mitch, had a record company and had already pressed some other blues type records and things, before he’d even put out ‘Fast Cars’, so Vince knew about the independent record company thing. And like I said, I wanted to kinda make a record myself, so I was kinda pickin’ his brain to find out what it took to do that. I thought it was like this big involved process, but he’s like, “no, no maan, it’s easy – you just do this, there’s a pressing plant over here, you do that, you do the labels…” and so on and so forth. So I was trying to find out through Vince how I could do that, but I got kinda side-tracked in the interim because he had heard ‘Fantasy’ and he was like, “this is the stuff that I’ve always wanted to do but I don’t know how to do it”.

Now Vince is one of these nerdy type of guys, but he’s pretty smart, he knows how to finagle his way into situations, and to this day he never ceases to amaze me in the things that he gets himself into. I mean, this guy could talk his way into the presidency and everyone will be asking, “how did he get there?” – that’s the kind of guy he is. So because he had the group Z Factor and he knew I had written ‘Fantasy’, he was like, “would you be interested in being a part of Z Factor?” At first I was like, “no, I’m not interested”, because they had made ‘Fast Cars’ and that wasn’t something that I wanted to do. But as I thought more about it, I was like, “well, maybe this is the way that I can get his father to put out ‘Fantasy’”, because his father had the record company. So then I was like, “okay, I’ll try it and we’ll see”.

When I joined Mitch, he was ecstatic about ‘Fantasy’ too because he knew, first off, I was like the man in town – the big DJ – that I was playing it in the clubs, that I gave Frankie Knuckles a tape of it before the record came out, and he was actually playing the reel-to-reel tape. The Warehouse and everybody knew the record, so it was almost like he had a built-in promotion network and all he had to do was press it and sell it. But what happened was, it took him a long time to actually press the record and get it out.

In the meantime I was playing all over the place and I had been playing my own ‘On & On’ track now, and because I had gotten so frustrated with Mitch taking so long to get ‘Fantasy’ out, I was like, “well shoot, I’m gonna put out my own ‘On & On’ thing and make some money off of that”.

Another reason I wanted to put that out so fast was that we were getting requests from the record pool I belonged to called IRS that was a part of Importes Etc, although it was in a different building. Whatever I would play at The Playground that night, people would run to Importes Etc the next day trying to find it, and this is one of the ways the record pool gets its information on what the buzz is on a record from the streets. The original ‘On & On’ they couldn’t find, because that was a bootleg. Then, when I was playing my version, they couldn’t find that either because it wasn’t even a record yet. But the people knew who was playing it, because I was the only one who had it. So when I went to the record pool the guys there said, “people are requesting something we don’t know anything about – why don’t you make a tape so we can hear It?” So I made a tape, they played it, and sure enough someone said, “yeah, that’s it”, and they’re like, “what is it?”, and I said, “well, that’s my track, that’s ‘On & On’”. Then they were like, “maan, if you can get your hands on two or three hundred copies of this, we can sell ‘em in the store like that!”, and I was like seeing money lighting up in my head.

All of a sudden I thought back to Vince again, because he could get the record pressed. I went downtown to a little studio that the group called Omni had; that’s where it was recorded to a quarter-inch tape for mastering, and then we pressed the record at Larry Sherman’s place on the Jes Say Records label, which Vince named and did the logo for. I took the last thousand dollars I had to my name and invested it into pressing these records ’cause I knew I was gonna be able to sell them already.

Within ten days I had five hundred records and we sold them for four dollars when the actual rate back then was only two dollars and fifty cents, so Importes Etc was selling them for six ninety nine. We used a hundred for promotion, I made six hundred dollars profit off of the first batch and Importes Etc wanted two or three hundred more records, so we went back to Larry to press some more. But by this time places like Loop records and all these other places were calling, saying they wanted the record because they heard it was selling like hot cakes. So I was like, “well shoot, we need to press a thousand this time”, so we went in and pressed a thousand, and those were gone in like a week, and it just like started snowballing.

‘On & On’ actually came out in January of 1984, beating Mitch out with ‘Fantasy’ because his didn’t come out until a month or so later, but he capitalised off of that whole thing. ‘Fantasy’ got on the radio on WGCI and he ended up selling records that way, and to this day I have never seen royalties, publishing or anything for that record. But it really wasn’t a big deal either because I was making all my money from my own label, so I really didn’t care so much at that point.

So then I started thinking, “if that happens with just like a track, I wonder what would happen if I do a real song”, and that’s when we wrote ‘Funk U Up’. That came about because Duane Buford was having problems with his girlfriend, and he was like, “maan, I ain’t never going out with no more pretty girls, they’ll just fuck you up”, and we’re like, “hey, that’s the name of a song”, but we couldn’t use “fuck” so we used “funk” instead. That was the first song that was recorded on twenty-four track.

When we put that out, that became an instant hit, because back in those days Farley was the man on the radio, he was like the leader of the Hot Mix 5 and if he played your record, it was a hit. So the whole Hot Mix 5 embraced ‘Funk U Up’ and it just became this big mega hit. Then I did ‘Real Love’ and that did ten times better than ‘Funk U Up’ did. In between those, I was doing Wayne’s record, ‘Undercover’, which was like a huge underground hit that was probably one of the first records to expand us out of the Chicago area, because we started getting calls from Detroit. So we went up to Detroit to see what the club scene was like and they just embraced us. Then we went to Milwaukee, Indianapolis… then New York started getting our records and we were getting orders from there. The next thing we knew, guys from England were coming in wanting to license our product.

And that’s how it all started.

What Saunders doesn’t really mention in the above account is just how ground-breaking his ‘On & On’ track truly was. The reason why other DJs clamoured to buy his record wasn’t because he had recreated the ‘Space Invaders’ groove, but because he had forged a uniquely futuristic sound that could no longer simply be described as “disco”… it was something else. As genre-inspiring as ‘Planet Rock’ was for hip hop, ‘On & On’ was the first record to marry the synthetic stripped-down sounds of new electronic instruments with the spirit and heat of black dance music. There can’t be many other tracks that are this important… and to think it was only made because a thief stole his bootleg record.

Photos courtesy of Jesse Saunders

Posted by Manny Z

Quincy Jones

Manny Z — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 20:32:19 +0000

Just a quick word on Quincy Jones: I watched a cool BBC documentary on the man a couple of days ago. It’s crazy the amount of stuff that he’s done. Over the years I’ve gradually become aware of all the work he’s produced, but I still get surprised by new revelations. He’s a Midas machine. You should check his Wikipedia entry for the score.

Talking of: I’m curious to hear his score for In Cold Blood… what I heard in the documentary sounded pretty inventive, and almost like a precurser to what Pharrell and Chad do. And I know a mate of mine was probably fighting for breath when he heard that Jones produced Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ in eight weeks (that’s the album, not just the track).

To be honest, one of the things that impressed me most was the fact that he dated Nastassja Kinski for 6 years. Man, that cat had it all! Even my girlfriend fancies him – but who can blame her… he’s got a bigger cassette deck than me.

You’ve probably seen this clip already, but just in case – Jones and Herbie Hancock jamming with the freakuencies:

And you should definately watch this, from an apparently rare Quincy Jones TV special from 1983 – The Making Of Thriller:

Posted by Manny Z

Heralds Of Change

Manny Z — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 08:46:13 +0000

For some time now, Glasgow has been kicking London’s ass when it comes to electronic music. Not only do they have a thriving electro/techno scene there, but artists like Rustie and Hudson Mohawke are taking the experimental hip hop of J Dilla to a whole new level of creativity. Hudson has also been working with Dublin’s equally inspiring Mike Slott under the name Heralds Of Change, and on their Parliament-evoking track ‘Bopgunn’, featuring Olivier Daysoul, they show that they’re not limited to making downtempo beats. Refreshing.

Below are their MySpace links… be sure to snap up their vinyl whilst you still can.

Heralds Of Change

Hudson Mohawke

Mike Slott

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‘Big Booty Express’

‘The Party Scene’

Manny Z — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 12:10:57 +0000

Certainly one of the illest electro rap tracks ever, The Russell Brothers’ one and only record was produced by Lionel Joseph in 1983. Joseph mainly produced disco releases for West End Records, but this was before dance music had become so fragmented and specialised, and Joseph was able to wave his magic hand across most genres. Based in New York, he also had his own label, Electric Ice… that’s a hot label name.

Not much info is available on The Russell Brothers and as I found no photos of them, here are some NYC “party scene” shots from 1983-84. These amazing photos were taken by Ricky Flores; please visit his Flickr photostream for the full collection… with enough feedback he’ll hopefully publish a book.

Ricky Flores

Posted by Manny Z

Rowdy Superst*r

Manny Z — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 09:46:59 +0000

Saw Rowdy Superst*r play live in London about a year ago… great stage presence. He has that perfect mix of attitude and creativity which is sorely missing from a lot of young London artists. With some good momentum this guy could go places.

He’s currently in the States and has just shot this stylin’ video… (directed by Oliver Sudden, who has also shot promos for the likes of Noisettes and New Young Pony Club). You can drop comments over at his YouTube channel, and keep up to date with live shows at his MySpace.

YouTube

MySpace

‘Tick, Tock’, 2008

‘Adventures In Success’

Manny Z — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 14:47:55 +0000

As I haven’t posted anything in a while I was just going to quickly put up this track by Will Powers, but as I didn’t know anything about him I thought I’d do a bit of research first… turns out “he” is a “she”. And a pretty impressive career she has had!

Her real name is Lynn Goldsmith and Will Powers was the name she used for a tongue-in-cheek self-help album back in 1983. It was released on Island and features a raft of big names, such as Nile Rodgers, Sting and Robert Palmer. Goldsmith was probably able to recruit such a glittering array of stars by virtue of the fact she was a music and film photographer, having photographed pretty much everyone from Michael Jackson to Mick Jagger. She documented much of The Police’s career and spent a lot of time at Compass Point Studios where Sly & Robbie were based.

She also directed music videos and apparently her video for ‘Adventures In Success’ was the first to feature computer animation. The track was produced by Steven Stanley and the story behind it is pretty interesting. I’ve copied the following directly from the liner notes (written by David Katz) to ‘Funky Nassau: The Compass Point Story’ compilation which has coincidentally only just been released. I’d buy it but I have most of the records already, but I recommend it to anyone wanting to hear the best of this studio’s work – it features Tom Tom Club, Talking Heads and Grace Jones, and includes mixes by François Kevorkian and Larry Levan.

Noted photographer Lynn Goldsmith, who had often been present at Compass Point since being invited to the studio by the B-52s, voiced and mixed a very peculiar number of her own called ‘Adventures In Success’, which she describes as “self-help humour”. The track, which was mixed by Steven Stanley in 1982 and released as a 12-inch single by Island under her alter-ego alias, Will Powers, has a complicated genesis: summoned to Compass Point because Marianne Faithful, Joe Cocker and Robert Palmer were all working on material at the same time and Chris Blackwell [head of Island Records] hoped Goldsmith could photograph them together, Goldsmith wound up voicing a rhythm Palmer was building in the demo studio he had set up at home, after Faithful and Cocker failed to lay down vocals that Palmer found impressive.

“The rhythm track was a steal from a James Brown thing,” Goldsmith explains, “and after having enough drinks, Marianne starts singing some melody, but Palmer said, ‘No, that’s not really it.’ Joe comes over and there’s more drinking going on; Joe sings a little bit and then he leaves, and Palmer said, ‘No, that’s not really it.’ It was about four o’clock in the morning and I had been thinking about if I were to make a record, what I would do; I thought that the human speaking voice was also an instrument and it could be used in certain ways, and I would pick tapes from preachers and use a vocoder on myself and come up with these kinds of positive thinking lyrics, because I thought that music had such a strong effect on our subconscious, that if we could have these lyrics in there and if I could be funny about it, then that would be different than what anybody else did. We have a guy here called Reverend Ike who has a big church up on Park Avenue, and I always thought that the power of those voices and the way in which they spoke was mesmerising, so I always collected tapes; Reverend Ike was my favourite, but I had lots of others.”

With such concepts in mind, Goldsmith asked Palmer to turn on his tape recorder. “By this time I was really pretty drunk, so I did my thing and he got so excited about it, he called up Blackwell, and Blackwell came over and got really excited and said, ‘I want to put this out.’ So I said, ‘No, I’ve been working on this for a long time and I have an idea of how I want to do it and I’m going to go off and do it my way, but Chris, if I come back with something that you like, I want an album, and I want you to be my producer.’ So he said, ‘OK,’ and that’s how Will Powers came to be. I left and I went to England, because I had to shoot something over there, and I asked Sting if he would work with me on the song, so Sting and I went into Island’s studio in London; he played all the instruments and I was on the Linn drum machine. Then I went down to Compass Point for my first session, and it was just Chris Blackwell, me and Steve Stanley in the studio.”

Goldsmith multi-tracked her voice in various guises to portray the song’s different characters, with the exception of a very deep voice that states the various “laws of success”, which was provided by a Compass Point stand-in. Although the rest of the album was later crafted with Steve Winwood and Nile Rodgers in New York and mixed by Todd Rundgren, the song ‘Adventures In Success’ was mixed at Compass Point by Steven Stanley, who added a minor keyboard part and made sure the single was complete with the shimmering dub version.

Girl on a LinnDrum… heaven!

The dub version is at the top of this post, and below is one of two edits of the video:

Posted by Manny Z

Transvolta

Manny Z — Tue, 20 May 2008 09:07:58 +0000

Dan Lacksman was the producer and sound engineer from Telex, the Belgian trio who had success with one of the earliest elecropop songs, ‘Moskow Diskow’. But prior to this he worked on a solo project under the name Transvolta. Originally released in 1978 on the French label, Disques Vogue, ‘Disco Computer’ remains one of the catchiest and most endearing of all “Italo” disco tracks. The b-side, ‘You’re Disco’, is an extension of it, and you get the impression that the French group Air probably fell in love with it.

Posted by Manny Z

Related Entry:
Chris Moore

‘Nightdrive’

Manny Z — Fri, 16 May 2008 15:46:17 +0000

Michael Guihen formed the UK new wave group Night Moves in 1980. Guihen had decided he wanted to start making music after hearing Gary Numan’s ‘Are Friends Electric’, and he was eventually introduced to Numan’s keyboardist Denis Haines. They worked together for a few months and one of the tracks they wrote was ‘Nightdrive’, which was to end up as the b-side on their now famous record, ‘Transdance’. With Haines both on synths and producing, the track inevitably shares the same futuristic coldness of Numan’s work.

Guihen would subsequently team up with scenester John Darc to finish work on ‘Transdance’, and both tracks were released in 1981 on GC Recordings. However, it wasn’t until the first reissue in 1983 (there was a second in 1986) that ‘Transdance’ really made waves, becoming a hit in New York, Chicago and Detroit clubs and becoming a popular track on radio stations like WBMX. Partly because of this WBMX connection, and mostly because until recently people didn’t really know much about the group, it has often been assumed that Night Moves was an Italo disco band. But Night Moves was one of the many UK new wave groups who influenced Detroit’s techno generation; in 1985, Juan Atkins borrowed the title of their b-side for his second Model 500 release.

Posted by Manny Z

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Lotti Golden & Richard Scher

Manny Z — Sat, 10 May 2008 16:17:27 +0000

Two records were released in 1982 which, for different reasons, helped define a new genre; ‘Electrophonic Funk’ by Shock and ‘Nunk’ by Warp 9. For some time, funk artists had been embracing the new electronic equipment that was coming out, not least Herbie Hancock, and it was inevitable that their experimentations would spawn a new style of funk, driven by synthesizers.

The next generation of artists continued to break new ground, but with the dancefloor firmly in mind, and tracks like Extra T’s ‘ET Boogie’ and Elektrik Funk’s ‘On A Journey (I Sing The Funk Elektric)’ were landmarks. This new music became known as electric boogie, or electro; but whilst ‘Electrophonic Funk’, released on Fantasy, may have helped name this new genre, the track itself wasn’t particularly interesting in musical terms and had a very safe sound, relying on saxophones and guitars for it’s energy. The track that really made an impact, along with ‘Planet Rock’ and ‘Hip Hop, Be Bop (Don’t Stop)’, was ‘Nunk’.

The title was an abbreviation of “new wave funk”, but whilst “nunk” may have lost out to the more exciting-sounding term “electro”, the Warp 9 track itself became one of the blueprints for the electro that would follow over the next couple of years.

Warp 9 was initially a one-off project created by the writer/producer duo of jazz vocalist Lotti Golden and keyboardist/bassist/programmer Richard Scher for the label, Prism. With mixes by John ‘Jellybean’ Benitez, ‘Nunk’ became such a huge hit on radio and in the clubs that Golden & Scher decided to make the group more permanent and hired Boe Brown, Ada Dyer and Chuck Wansley to make Warp 9 an act that could both perform in studio and tour around the country. The epic ‘Light Years Away’ followed in 1983, again with Jellybean mixes, and this track was equally important for the emerging freestyle sound with its emphasis on latin percussion.

Jellybean continued to work with Warp 9 and gets production credit on their debut album, but he would eventually move on to other projects. Although Warp 9 was Golden & Scher’s main outlet, they also worked with Arthur Baker, but the track posted below is one that they produced on their own under the name Chilltown – ‘Rock The Beat’. Both the vocal and dub mixes are good; the accursed saxophone rears its head again but the last minute of the dub rocks hard.

If nothing else, it’s nice to see that within the male-dominated world of the 80s electro producer, there was a woman involved in it too.

Posted by Manny Z