Space Age Disco Ya Don't Stop

"Meine Idee/My Idea," Daso Franke (2007): Cologne based music producer, has since this song died of cancer. Incandescent late nite New Wave electro disco; and the New Wave is in that fat bass, and maybe the vaguely melancholy washes of synths, and if you must know, the disco part is when it gets all wound up, the synths going off like heart-racing alarms, bounciness prevails, faster and faster to nowhere, grooving down the freeway to nowhere in particular, 

"Krack," Soulwax (2020): Alt-indie disco-forward EDM record; "rock music without electric guitars," says some promotional content. Has a big windup, some abstracted breathy vocal group tease, and then staggering, swaggering, jumping up and down, strutting back and forth electro tribal mashup. The squawk-box vocal, minimal, is indecipherable, and could have been one of the guys in Cabaret Voltaire. New wave noir electronic music with some hiphop bit-beats production values. A Banger. 

"Lost tape," Mutual Attraction (2001): You know sometimes how it's the singer and sometimes it's the song? Well, likewise, sometimes it's the dance music and sometimes it's the dancer or dancers. The dance music here is vaguely psychedelic ethnic fusion over a vintage Space Invaders dance music click-track; maybe a little House music in trance mode. Like something you might hear in a hip African restaurant. A little blank and generic but good enough exotic dance music vibes. The dancer in the video is one Kezza Palmer aka Mr Shapes. Kezza likes to dance and Kezza does indeed shape the music, giving it a more downbeat yet spiritually buoyant cast. As if this were the soundtrack to his daily Tai Chi workout, a skipping-in-place shuffle that does a Snoopy dance over personal demons and cranky passersby; bubbling over in playful low-key teasing enthusiasm as if a live action Energizer Bunny. 

"Fear," Easy Going (1980)

Ever wondered why Pink Floyd never made a disco track? Everyone else did in the 1970s. Or one better or more than "Another Brick in the Wall," anyway. This 1980 Italo-disco workout might satisfy your curiosity. Easy Going are named after a gay club in Rome. They put out a handful of records between 1978 and 1980 and sound here like Floyd doing some robotic disco. No dance floor liftoff crescendos but a suitably hypnotic assembly line groove with some cutting edge 1980 electronic disco moves. 

Bonus track: A goofy and energetic spin on Giorgio Moroder's electro-disco. And another significant subgenre deposit of Italo-disco or Euro-disco early 1980s. Hyper bouncy chirping tempos and rolling TV show synth fanfare. I adore pop disco instrumentals. "Plastic Doll," Dharma (1982)

Around the World the Robots Are Dancing!

 "Around the World," Daft Punk (1997): Yes, a lot of Daft Punk is fairly obviously a techno disco homage. If you already don't like disco or dance music this is an easy copout way to dismiss them. They can't sing. Their instruments are laptop computers. But if you like disco or dance music and Giorgio Moroder and Italo Disco and Romanthony then Daft Punk are '90s chart breakthrough for disco and goofy EDM genius, even if they get more broad and cliche as they go. Isn't that the way it often goes? And am I crazy or am I hearing some more "Good Times"? "Around the World" is the globalization of disco, although Madonna already did that. How about Daft Punk put the disco in electronica? Body music. Turn out the lights, turn on the disco ball. We're up all night to get lucky, even knowing already we won't, because we already are to feel this good. Thank the robots. The sex machines. Spin like a top, you can dance anyway you like. And "Get Lucky" (2013), much later, broader, more cliche, was a great dance song as well. Another bit of disco music keeping on keeping on. 

 

"Beyond the Dance," Rhythm is Rhythm (1989)

Third Generation Disco: David Mancuso to Frankie Knuckles to Derrick May or Rhythm is Rhythm. Invented spacey electro disco sound with collaborating DJ record nerd friends, The Belleville Three, from Detroit; innovating off Kraftwerk's electronic and ambient take on disco. They called their DJ soundsystem business Deep Space Soundworks. "Beyond the Dance" feels trance-y, even possibly psychedelic, a dash of ambient Brian Eno, chill-out dance music (before that became a tired brand) with this relentless buoyancy that hits that endless groove hooky repetition bell again but in a completely different register here: techno grooves, snappy castanets, crude electronics, a droning pinball machine, zen healing melodic cheap synth tones, pulsating, radiating outward like gamma rays. Where four or five minutes in you want the groove to go on forever: Serene, slow building, surging space disco Detroiters called Techno. Now, 2024, only its ambient splendor remains. And I am surprised this hasn't been endlessly looped in some Muzak space, elevator music, or grocery shopping to Rhythm is Rhythm. 

TGIDF 

The Battle Over Techno's Origins-- Detroit or Berlin?

"The anemic funding of the arts in America means that the institutions memorializing the country’s cultural exports look like scale models. 

The New Yorker, By T.M. Brown

"Spice," EON: From some TV dance show in Detroit in 1992. 

Classic Era Electro-Disco Valhalla

 "Lift Off," Patrick Cowley (1981): Disco did not die in 1979 but had a big litter of hyphenated disco babies. And should countdowns to Lift Off and exploding rocket engines count as Space Rock? 

 

"Hills of Katmandu (Disco Mix)," Tantra (1979): Italo Disco legend Celso Valli's late-classic era disco project; electro-disco w/ exotic and cheesy Eurasian melodies.  

"Magic Fly," Space (1977): I think Space also might figure somehow in the Italo Disco story that gets crazy big popular in Europe in the 1980s. I don't really know but I know there are scads of CD compilations of Italo Disco from the '80s with scores of acts doing something a little closer to Eurythmics Brit New Pop than Tantra or Space's proto-Eurodisco. But the Space Disco thing remains such a big thing all the way through the Italo Disco early 1980s; so big I've seen a best-of Italo Space Disco collection. I've read a couple of books I liked about Spaghetti Westerns but none yet about Italo Disco or Italo House; or maybe it should be 1980s Eurodisco? Like the Spaghetti's nickname leaves out Spanish, German, and other contributions from other parts of Europe in the making of Euro-Westerns. Presumably, the Italian designation means a lot of the production happens in Italy but this record is from France. I do remember reading somewhere (probably Wikipedia) that the production of Italo Disco records really doesn't take off in the early '80s until after the music industry in America abandons disco in 1979 (b/c, remember, some classic rock longhairs burn some disco records in effigy at a Chicago White Sox game in the late summer of that year). When the American disco imports dried up young people into disco in Europe had to make their own records, the story goes, but "Magic Fly," No. 1 in France, proves they were already making their very own disco, Space Disco, even before American disco imports had stopped. Another one for Team Disco.