Rude 66 (aka Ruud Lekx) has made a name for himself over the last decade producing dark acid and vintage machine electro for the Dutch label Bunker. “Strings of Death,” his latest single, sharpens his pop edge a bit, with two vocoder tracks that play heavily into the mystique of sci-fi italo and disco. The sickly sweet “Break the Silence” could probably only be made in such a conscious era of revivalism, but taken as is, it’s the best Daft Punk/Data 80 hybrid I’ve heard all year, with a transparent sheen that rivals the best production work by either of those two artists. Balancing things out is “A Message from Heaven,” where an industrial-like gloom enclose a speech by a preacher in South Carolina warning everyone to repent and prepare for the second coming of God. What’s peculiar is this preacher naturally speaks in very even segments, rarely altering the tone of his voice, and tells his message in such a methodical way you’d think he was just reading it out of a book. How appropriate though, for an EP focused on robots and machines.

Vynalogica / Vynalogica 09
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[Michael F. Gill]

Two handy state-of-the-union addresses from the Clone family, Vintage Future is a mix of recent releases and reissues, while ReCloned offers the best remixes from the label. Serge does a nice job of showing how easily the old (Marshall Jefferson, Mike Dunn, Egyptian Lover) mixes with the new (Alden Tyrell, Lindstrom, Dexter), blurring the lines of electro-funk, italo, and acid house with a fast-paced mix. The best rediscovery is the recently reissued “Every Sunday” by Crazy Gang, an electro-vocoder romp with lyrics about overbearing parents that make their child go to church every Sunday. ReCloned is unmixed, but shares the same family of artists and range of sound. Standouts include recent releases like Charles Webster’s spacey deep house version of Delgui’s “Highlights,” and Elitechnique’s mix of Alden Tyrell’s “La Voix,” as well as established classics like the Carl Craig remix of “Hand to Phone” and Tiefschwarz’s remix of Unit 4’s “Body Dub.” You might have to deal with a lot of “I Feel Love” style arrangements, but both mixes are great palette cleansers in a market currently cluttered with minimal and electro-house mixes.

Clone / Clone# cd8 / Clone# cd9
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[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]

Four sinister, slithering slabs of techno come our way from Holland with the Kremahitz EP on the Scotland’s new-ish electro/disco label Mighty Robot. Caught somewhere between soundtrack-y menace (check the murder mystery strings on “M&M2″) and thick, heavy textures (the spacey thunk of “Eltec” and crystal meth thrills of “4barloop2″), Van Der Vleuten finds time to bust out some pure electro via Rude 66’s “Gortex Remix” of “Eltec.” A well-rounded EP covering multiple angles of the noir dancefloor.

Mighty Robot / MRR 00000003
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[Mallory O’Donnell]

What is it about cold lands that bringeth pop so warm? “I’ll Be By Your Side” is a typically irresistible slice of Nordic joy, vocoder and all, that manages to balance economy and lushness in such an impeccably hip way that all your potential arguments simply bounce off the ironclad resolve of its pure poptasticness. Diskokaine/Clone bring us a 12″ with a remix (unnecessary) and a b-side “Time to Let Go” (tres necessaire), in which our dear Sally shares her command of French and Francophile pop, while still keeping the hat firmly tipped toward that dynamic pan-European style. The single is rounded off by an egregious track from producer Johan Agebjorn, who may need a tap on the shoulder to remind him that the 80’s did, in fact, end. All the two-decades gone simplicities that make Sally’s vocal tracks resound lose their steam in this cut, appropriately-titled “Overload.”

Diskokaine / DK 002
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[Mallory O’Donnell]

From the sixties ‘til the eighties Italian cinema did well for itself swallowing up American genres and then regurgitating them just nastily enough to create something new in the process. From the mid-seventies onward their music industry, pushed on in part by soundtrack composers, did the same. Where the related compilation I-Robots tackled post-Moroder electronic disco, Confuzed Disco is, well, just what the title claims, covering more electroid new wave. But that’s new wave as might be understood by a cheap film producer looking to score a blue-neon lit nightclub scene in a sweaty French Connection knockoff. There’s lotsa second language crap raps (check N.O.I.A.’s date rape anthem “Do You Wanna Dance”) and stilted, uptight machine drum patterns here, but it retains a certain charm. The second disc of contemporary remixes casts its net a bit wider into some already-compiled Italo classics with a gorgeous, relaxed Morgan Geist re-edit of Gaz Nevada’s “Special Agent Man” and a version of Nevada’s “I.C. Love Affair” by Munk that struts with a bass-loaded staccato swing. Amongst the others remixing are Lindstrom and Prins-Thomas, Radio Slave, and Kiki who, no surprise, surgically extract the original groove whilst leaving behind the grossest signifiers. Sometimes it’s their loss.

Mantra Vibes / IRM822 CD
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[Patrick McNally]

Oh Italo, how I am powerless to resist thee. Every time I tell myself epic synthscapes, gurgling disco percussion, and the joyful combination of dark and cheesy must eventually grow tiresome, I am proven wrong by another upstart single like this. “The Hollow Land” is a fine addition to the Creme stable, four filmic yet danceable slabs with fanciful Arabesque names (”On Tigris I Thirst” is the hands-down winner, though he gets bonus points for referencing Damascus steel). There’s something evoking a “journey” in the sequencing (much like labelmate Legowelt), but rather than reeking of pretension it reminds you how a little Northern European / Mediterranean connection can keep one from losing everything to dour minimalism.

Crème Organization / CREME 12-25
[Mallory O’Donnell]

As one of the first producers to return to the sounds that made up early Italo-disco Alden Tyrell was one of the few modern artists to feature on I-F’s influential Mixed Up in the Hague, the mix which sent diggers to the crates to scrabble for previously dismissed early-80s electronic disco and producers to their equipment to try to recreate it. Times Like These gathers on CD some of the best of his past work and a few new tracks. Tyrell’s post–house and techno take on Italo is trackier, more explicitly electro dance-floor functional than the trashy, wannabe commercial originals but still works best when it retains at least vestigial attachment to song form. On “Love Explosion 05”, a vocal rework of a track from ’99, old school Italoid Fred Ventura emotes soft-rock sweet nothings over filtered white-noise snares and hi-hats. It sounds as cheap as the sentiment. The other vocal guest, Nancy Fortune, brings the over-enunciated second language English to the motorik space dust of “La Voix.” “Knockers” compares and contrasts the ever-present synth arpeggios with cyclic tom tom rolls and fills. I ad-lib lyrics about being a sultry time-travelling space woman over the Liaisons Dangereuses percussion of “Phaze Me” but that’s only in the privacy of my own room. You might just want to dance instead; I strongly recommend it.

Clone / C#cd7
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[Patrick McNally]

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]

Currently available as a free download from DJ Kafka’s website, this re-edit of a track from Sparks Moroder-produced No. 1 In Heaven proves that buoyant, beefy Italo knows no national boundaries. Homing in on the classic oscillators and the “let us outta here” chorus, Kafka diverts the slightly clunky post-disco feel of the original into a sleeker and more (dare I say it) modern beast. Sparks and Italo both deserve a Renaissance, but it’s the lost art of the re-edit that really needs re-investigation. Taking nothing more than the original released version of a track, one can easily, as Kafka’s done here, take a workable or decent track and cut and paste it’s prime moments (or those of a number of versions of the track) into something that rocks out whatever kink your particular dancefloor gets off on. Considering the ready availability of track-editing software, what once took hours of laborious tape-splicing is now just a click or two away. Get on it people!

[Mallory O’Donnell]