Susumu Yokota (1960–2015) was a Japanese electronic musician, DJ, and composer whose work moved between club music and more contemplative ambient sounds. On the club side, he emerged in the early 1990s with acid house and techno bangers like this monster 17-minute EP. Sometimes under aliases such as Frankfurt Tokyo Connection, Ebi, and Stevia, or here as Tenshin with his friend Makoto. Behind the big slugging beats and frantic Noirish stabs of cheap synths you can already hear the shifting, building, cascading, looping, Musique concrete of Yokota's more mature ambient music. Hypnotic big beat acid house right there when raves and EDM were blowing up for the first time. Not that I was there but I can hear the energy; experimental dance music energy. Rocking out, getting down, etc, universal musical languages.
How does it feel to be on your own? Sifting through the rubble, bringing up the dead, reassembling history from below.
Disco-- Everybody's doin' it: Richie Havens "Back to My Roots" (1980)
A funny part of getting into the deep cuts of the disco era, as I've mentioned before, is how eventually everybody's doing it, everybody seems to get around to making their disco track. B.B. King. Little Feat. Camel. Barbara Streisand. The Beach Boys. Even the opening act at Woodstock!
"Going Back to My Roots," Lamont Dozier (1977): For Dozier, the great songwriter who co-wrote and produced 14 Billboard number one hits with Motown, living in LA at the time the song was about going back to his Black roots in Detroit. An intimate psychological (if epic) journey; the original clocks in at over 9 minutes long. But Hugh Masekela, South African trumpeter, producer, anti-apartheid artist, contributes to production and takes the song back to Africa. The final section moves explicitly into Afrobeat territory, chanting in Yoruba and carrying on with the collaborative energy of sizzling global funk music; so LA to Detroit to Soweto. It's a great track, if maybe a little disjointed by its Dozier and Masekela sides. But Havens' voice and the way his discofied version fully transforms the song into this multicultural global dance anthem really takes it to another level for me. Makes it a post-disco global disco classic.
country blues-jazz-soul-funk proto-disco
Despite the upscale disco-w-strings velvet rope fantasy stereotype, Barry White, "The Hustle," Deodato*, what struck me reviewing '70s disco DJ playlists in The Disco Files was how much gutbucket country blues-jazz-soul-funk gets played in the underground gay discos. The first two tracks following are in that spirit and the other three I'm pretty sure I found in TDFs.
*- Brazilian pianist, composer, and jazzy disco record producer Eumir Deodato has a daughter married to actor Stephen Baldwin and a granddaughter married to Justin Bieber. Keeping up the legacy of the '70s disco era's decadence, they're apparently still getting into trouble at nightclubs in the 2020s.