Phonica are sometimes prone to softcore boosterism – well, I guess they are trying to sell you the record, so “duh” – but in their description of Armando’s recently rescued and re-released “Don’t Take It” they actually nail it: “This is up there as one of the hottest (and best) records of 2007 even though this track was produced almost 20 years ago. Now that’s just insane. Did you expect anything less from Chicago legend Armando?” To be honest, I did expect something less, given the trendency of the past few years for re-releasing “undiscovered gems” from the vaults to cashed-up, retro-hungry record collectors, their needles and ears famished for the so-called glory days.

Along with Trax Records, Chicago label Let’s Pet Puppies have been on the better end of this rescue mission, first with two Marcus Mixx’ tracks, and now with a lost Armando classic, apparently recorded in one take after an all-nighter, with vocals recorded from the toilet. Like the Marcus Mixx tracks, “Don’t Take it” has been “Resurrected by Thomos and Re-animated by the amazing Johnny Fiasco”. If you were enamoured with the minimalist acid tracks out in 2004 like John Tejada’s “Sweat on the Walls”, you’re going to lose your shit when you hear this. With little more than a gulping, descending acid bassline, some spare Roland percussion and Sharvette’s “sisters are doin’ it for themselves” monologue, this track slowly, relentlessly becomes more and more deranged, unhinging itself around the unchanging bassline. Damned if this doesn’t send the whole dancefloor down the rabbit hole.

Fiasco’s edit streamlines and boomptifies proceedings, shedding Sharvette and altering the bass melody so that it wiggles in and out, rather than down. This one’s got a whole lot less personality than the vocal cut, but holds its own as a neat and useful transition track with some nice percussive tricks which would make it fun to play with on a big system. Hear this single and remember what it’s all about. But let’s hope that it doesn’t turn you into a cashed-up, retro-hungry record collector. Nothing is more suspicious than “the good old days”.

Let’s Pet Puppies / LPP 003
[Listen]
[Peter Chambers]

Happy Monday to all. Be sure to check out Michael F. Gill’s featured article on Stylus this week: The Bluffer’s Guide To Freestyle

Three more italo, electro, and house nuggets from Clone’s reliable Classic Cuts imprint, and the hits just keep on coming. First up is Dopplereffekt, the well-known Detroit electro collective featuring Gerald Donald of Drexciya. Gesamtkunstwerk is a reissue of a compilation that Gigolo put out in 1999, made up of all the vinyl sides from the group’s own Dataphysix Engineering label. It’s got all the hallmarks you’d expect to find on an electro record (sci-fi/technology themes, bleakly monophonic synths, precise/robotic beats) but with a consistency and a pop sensibility that the genre often lacks. The sleazy female vocals deadpanning on tracks like “Pornovision” and “Pornoactress” also predict what Adult’s Nicola Kuperus (and in turn, many electroclashers) would be doing years down the road. Great stuff.

Second up is a reissue of Los Angeles TF’s electro-italo smash “Magical Body” from 1983, sounding amazingly pristine here in a new remaster by Alden Tyrell. I wasn’t originally sold on the vocal version, where singer Taffy (of “I Love My Radio” fame) seems to over-emphasize the end of each phrase (”Magical! Magical! Is your bod-EE!”), but the tracky instrumental on the B provides immediate gratification, and shows why so many nu-italo producers were inspired to do what they do.

For the third helping, we get another EP of vintage acid house from Mike Dunn. Clone boss Serge was so scared to damage his vinyl copy of Dunn’s “So Let It Be House” he’s gone out and secured this reissue of it, along with two superior b-sides. While the press releases gushes about the title cut’s rareness, and frames 1980s Chicago as this exotic, magical place, to these ears it’s an overly sparse acid track with another “Birth of House Music” speech. It may be the weakest of this trio of releases, but I sort of get the cross-continental appeal. I’m never going to be a intimidating black man from the streets either.

Clone Classic Cuts / C#CC 004/005/006
[Listen]
[Listen]
[Listen]
[Michael F. Gill]

Call it synergy: Lizzy Mercier Descloux’s self-titled third album (repackaged here as Zulu Rock) paired the urgent optimism of the French singer with the sweet, sunny sounds of local South African musicians. Predating Paul Simon’s worldbeat excursions on Graceland, Zulu Rock expanded on the funky Afro/Caribbean flirtations of Mambo Nassau, adding in bits of reggae, French pop, and African highlife, while removing the last traces of the atonal post-punk bite Descloux showed early in her career. Throughout the liner notes of all her reissues on the Ze label, Descloux is described as someone that empathically embraced the culture she was in, whether it be Paris, Manhattan, Nassau, Johannesburg, or Rio de Janeiro. But don’t call it dilletantism, call it an infatuation with music and life. And that’s something inspiring.

CBS Records / Ze Records
1984 / 2006
[Michael F. Gill]

A release scooping up most, but not all, of the Italo group Tantra’s output, The Double LP revolves around two side-length epics—the A-side “Hills of Katmandu,” and the D-side “Wishbone.” I first heard the former (in truncated form) on the Idjut Boys classic Saturday Night Live, Vol. 2 mix, and if it blew me away then, it’s even more potent in its full 16-minute-plus glory. Exotica and “orientalist” touches were always a feature of Italo, and “Hills of Katmandu” deftly weaves such fare into a monster of rumbling percussion, weaving analogs, and swaying female vocals. The sweet little nugget of disco fantasia that interrupts at the 6:30 mark is both unexpected and cheesily delightful. “Wishbone,” on the other hand, is funkier and more mesmerizing—the odd female vocals are paired with echoed tribal percussion to a mystical and almost eerie effect, with a sitar-like lead making the odd appearance. It’s the mirror of “Katmandu,” but an unsettlingly purist one—making absolutely no concessions towards any but the most tripped-out of dancefloors. If I could find the crowd that would happily vibe along with me to all of its 15 glorious minutes I would never bloody leave.

Normally this would constitute a full and rewarding album, but in between these two leviathans is sandwiched another two full sides of goodness that interweaves primal and futurist elements. The B-side unveils two strong Eurodisco stompers: “Get Ready to Go,” which could’ve soundtracked any number of early 80’s prime-time buddy-cop TV shows, and “Top Shot,” a track that pushes all the gay disco buttons it can find and then digs around for some more. The C-side, on the other hand, starts with “Su-ku-leu,” a traditional African-flavored number that still kicks out on its disco heels, combining the chants and ethnic percussives with synth pops and sweeps, which blends right into “Mother Africa,” a T-Connection-esque stomper with a delicious percussion break that sets the stage for the most stereotypically “disco” of their tracks, “Hallelujah.” Side closer “Get Happy” points an arrow towards boogie, and could be a Chic b-side, with its warm syn-strings and chimes. It’s the very spirit of disco’s unabashed joyfulness, and a fine place to rest.

The Double LP is that great disco rarity—not just a classic album, but a classic double, and as such it demands a proper remix and CD release. Until then… keep those needles fresh!

Importe/12 / MP-310
[Mallory O’Donnell]

Kano’s second album, New York Cake was a bit of a sop to the mainstream disco world. Having created one of the essential Italodisco longplayers with their eponymous debut, Kano toned down the spacey, instrumental portions of their sound and went for a more R&B feel—this resulted in some awkward moments and a few successes, but “Don’t Try to Stop Me” is not amongst them. Combining the alien black leather funk of the first record with all the sprightly downtownisms of New York Cake, it’s truly a lost classic. The vocoder-lace vocal reciting the title like a raison d’etre spars with an earnest “I must go, so let me go.” and a memorable heroic synth lead, and my friends we cannot be stopped from knocking down the walls and proceeding directly to Euroheaven. Another great moment in the long-running canon of genre-defining dance music from the Continent.

Mirage / 311
[Mallory O’Donnell]

Despite being a highly prolific and innovative DJ, remixer, engineer and producer for the last two decades, Ben Liebrand still seems rather under heard outside of his native country of The Netherlands. His 1983 radio show “In The Mix,” on local station Radio Veronica is often cited as the first radio shows to feature non-stop mixing/beat-matching, and the station also exclusively featured Liebrand’s own remixes and re-edits throughout the 80s.

From this he went on to produce the yearly “Grandmix,” for Veronica from 1983-992, which was an amazing mix of 100 of the years beat dance tracks whittled down to an hour. Sure, this idea of the “megamix” has practically become cliche over the years, but if you’ve ever been lucky to hear one of Ben’s grandmixes (they were never released, although radio copies are often bootlegged and traded) it’s an amazing thrill to hear how he well he can perfectly blend thirty second snippets of underground disco, italo, house, and hi-nrg with such mainstream hits by George Michael and INXS. Trevor Jackson (aka Playgroup) recently tried to something similar with his erratic “Party Mix” from a couple of years back, but lacks the sheer minute focus of Liebrand’s mixes, which, over the course of the hour, can really paint a uniform picture of what that year sounded like. There’s a highly detailed Dutch fansite which has a listing of most of his playlists from back when.

Nowadays, he has finally dipped into the world of commercially available mix CDs, and is selling them through his own website. Ironically, one of my favorites is his unmixed “Grand 12 Inches” series, a great primer of disco classics and obscurities in their full-length versions. I also love the obsessive technical details he keeps about the recording of his mixes: “If nothing else was available, vinyl copies were used which were recorded into the DD1500 from a Technics SL1200mkII turntable fitted with a new Stanton 681EEE stylus, running through a Studer turntable preamplifier.” It’s certainly an interesting site to wander around in.

[Michael F. Gill]

If an inclusion into The Wire’s list of “100 records that set the world on fire (when no one was listening)” means an automatic spot in permanent obscurity, it does also give Monotonprodukt07 a free pass to avant-garde legitimatization in the same broad-stroke. Such obscurity also breeds a reputation for Konrad Becker’s masterpiece into a cultish following. A following that I fell entrapped by when critic Matthew Ingram not only called the record “the square root of Basic Channel, Kompakt and Oval” but also “a very strong candidate for the most important record of the last 30 years”—seemingly hyperbolic statements that both piqued interest and skepticism. But even after my initial pair of spins, I knew I couldn’t refuse.

With Monoton’s constant pulses of arpeggiating analog synths stringing together much of Monotonprodukt07, the album has an uncanny sense of sterility and rigidity that is not only furthered by Becker’s interests in mathematics and sound, but also as a metaphor running through the song titles (ie. “Soundsequence” & “Root of 1=1”). But there’s a tactile expanse that belies a merely frigid barren; echoes, drones, and fat dubbed oceanic waves of analog sound complicate the strictly dystopic tone of the tracks. Becker’s intention of an “integrated sound massage” certainly comes across with the sensuous drones of “New” and acid-tinged pounding of “Where Am I?” Littering the sheen of the underpinned rhythms with trance-inducing murmurs, Becker’s vocals float in and out from ether, sounding less like mere disembodied voices than full-on séances. Rather than just an ominous tone throughout, there’s a variety of trance-states that each track achieves, from the motorik-lite of “Root of 1=1” to Becker’s curiously nonchalant chant of “a fish in water thirsty” in “Wasser.”

While easier to trace paths back to Monotonprodukt’s influence on minimal techno, with the austere chic of Richie Hawtin and the label Sahko as the first of many strains to spring to mind, it becomes profoundly more difficult to explain why this didn’t “set the world on fire” itself in its time. Perhaps the album’s trance-like meditations transferred directly to its reception, with it spurning an interest that is more a fixation than an explosion. But Monotonprodukt07 is a fixation that haunts, not aging a day since it was first released—instead caressing and completely disregarding the effects of time itself. The re-release of the album sound especially impacting with a nice digital re-mastering for CD in 2003, retitled Monoproduckt07 20y++.

Monoton / Monotonprodukt 07
[Nate DeYoung]

The rare conjunction of two of the finest producers in the underground disco scene, Leroy Burgess (Logg/Aleem/Black Ivory) and Patrick Adams (P & P Records, Cloud One,) “Barely Breaking Even” is an underground anthem still so resonant today that a label was named for it (the influential BBE Records.) Built around a propulsive walking bass, polyrhythmic hand-percussion, Chic-like guitar and one of Adams’ infamous wonky synthesizer lines, it’s alternately throbbing and shuddering, exploding itself into a vibrant groove that seems almost too strange to dance to, yet cannot be resisted. Mercilessly funky during the instrumental intro alone, by the time Leroy Burgess breaks into his opening “Well, well, well” you feel struck by a lightning bolt. What carries it across a staggering eleven-plus minutes is the conjunction of Burgess’ impassioned vocals and the insistent, wobbly funk of the instrumental.The story that unfolds is one of economic hardship (”well, I just got my paycheck, and I’m on my way home/ between the rent and phone bills, it’s nearly gone”) and the desire to escape it (”Just barely breaking even/ I’ve got to get some for myself”)—hardly unfamiliar territory in black music. But where we might hear the likes of a Young Jeezy casting about for reasons to justify their own avarice, “Barely Breaking Even” finds joy in the face of adversity: the struggle as evidence of life, rather than the struggle as means to the end of monetary gain (”but I just try to make it into another day / Long as the Lord is with me, I’ll find a way.”) Coupled with a groove that is uplifting to a spiritual degree, this is the kind of song that endures because it acknowledges and addresses the ever-present material difficulties of our lives with optimism and hope rather than blitheness, blame or despair.Combining elements of disco, latin, boogie and R&B, “Barely Breaking Even” is a great dance song, pure and simple. Musically, it’s a perfect fit for today’s DJs and artists exploring that fertile early 80’s crossover period. Lyrically, it is wholly timeless—a gospel feel and a spirit of struggle in the face of economic challenges that surely haven’t vanished in the two decades since it was first released. Currently still available (mixed and unmixed) on Dimitri from Paris’ stellar Disco Forever set, Moonglow Records have also reissued it on vinyl, featuring the full original version and a slightly shorter instrumental edit.Moonglow / 103
[Mallory O’Donnell]