Rub N Tug’s previous mixes were recorded live, complete with shitty mixing, fuzzed out sound, and skull-fucking EQ—the good stuff—but this one takes a different approach, possibly because a third disc with corny mixer FX would be one too many. Instead we get a pristine and minimally mixed set of electronic disco 45s slowed to 33, including Gino Soccio, Soft Cell, and err, King Crimson. The tracks are less “chopped and screwed” than edited and cosmic-fied: it’s bad pills, not heavy syrup. At its best, beats string loosely together like solar systems, with reverb draped around them like rings; drawled out sax lines might as well be monophonic synths and guitars sound like beached whales. At its worst you might be begging to push the pitch control back to zero. Overall, this is one for those gross, sweaty nights post-clubbing where the only way to get through it is to make one’s-self feel worse. I’m sure we’ve all had some of those.

aNYthing / ANY006-CD
[Listen]
[Patrick McNally]

“In the Morning” doesn’t exactly attempt to turn the Junior Boys’ basic template for blue-eyed electronic soul on its head. Perhaps the biggest difference is in the extravagant production quality, which makes some of their previous recordings sound lo-fi. Alex Smoke’s remix drops the live instrumentation and funk of “In the Morning” to bring in a swarm of percussive samples, while raising the vocals in the mix. Unfortunately, it doesn’t live up to one’s expectations. For his remix of “The Equalizer,” Morgan Geist ditches the sparse beat for water-drop electro, improvising and accentuating the existing melodies, but the result sounds more like a nice re-edit than a completely different version. Finally, “So Sleep” shows the Boys in dubbed-out space techno mode. If not to screen the Smoke and Geist remixes, “In the Morning” sells itself on its closing B-side.

Domino / RUG237t
[Listen]
[Cameron Octigan]

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
[Listen]
[Patrick McNally]

This time: The Disco-tech of… series from France’s Yellow Productions; home and launching pad for Kid Loco, Dimitri From Paris, and Bob Sinclair.

The Disco-tech of…Julien Jabre (2003)
Still the only CD with Julien’s name on it, it is also the most diverse entry in the series so far, ranging from jazzy fusion, to disco and deep house, with little emphasis on the “tech.” To be honest, Jabre dangerously flirts with samba-ish cocktail jazz and velvety vocal house throughout, but through excellent mixing and sequencing, he does manage to hold interest way longer than, say, Thievery Corporation. Besides bookending the mix with a snippet of Philippe Sarde’s tumultuous score to “Les Choses De La Vie,” and including the extended version of Carl Craig’s epochal “Domina,” there’s little to interrupt the lush keyboards, round edges, and accomplished arrangements of each track here. And while it’s surprising to hear anonymity coming from tracks by such heavyweights as Herbie Hancock and Marvin Gaye, it’s good to see a mix that gives the smoother, classier side of jazz, disco, and house music a more respectable (if completely un-hip) name.

The Disco-tech of…DJ Cosmo (2003)
Veteran NYC/London resident Collen Murphy (aka DJ Cosmo) isn’t as well-known as Jabre or Robotnick, so here’s a short resume: she runs the label Bitches Brew, is a member of that forgotten Playhouse supergroup Light Fantastic, and is one of the few people allowed to fill in for David Mancuso during one of his famous loft parties. Right. Murphy’s mix is probably the one in the series that fits conceptions of what one would think “disco-tech” would sound like. Chicken Lips, Metro Area, Robotnick, Gino Soccio, and other synth-heavy artists fill out the tracklisting, including a slaying instrumental version of Rafael Cameron’s Salsoul hit “Boogie’s Gonna Get Ya” that is practically worth the price of admittance. There’s also a couple of great detours: namely the Isaac Hayes-baiting funk of Los Chicharbons and the old-school disco rapping by Fertile Ground. The only problem I have with this mix is that it feels more like a collection of good/excellent tracks that stand up by themselves, rather than a solid blended mix. Pickiness aside, Murphy holds her own against Jabre and Robotnick.

The Disco-tech of…Alexander Robotnick (2004)
Definitely the most popular in the series, Mr. Robotnick’s mix lays down the links between electro-clash, new wave, and italo disco while still being defiantly populist. It’s likely that since Maurizio Dami never DJed throughout the 80s, he hasn’t worn out all of the obvious genre touchstones and headed towards white-label obscurity. So, you get such familiar new wave staples like “Bizarre Love Triangle,” “Wordy Rappinghood,” and “Enola Gay” rubbing up against nu-school tracks from Miss Kitten, Bangkok Impact, and Dopplereffekt (with a half-dozen italo classics splitting the hipster difference.) It may not have as much value to dance music nerds, but it does show a neat musical continuity over the past three decades: all the canonical tracks of each era have a similar idea of what defined radiant, romantic, and melodic dance music.

[Michael F. Gill]

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]

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 Italo-disco is a body lain upon a cold stone slab, the good folks at Global Darkness are the ones standing at its head, breathing life back into it. Krypta 1982 collects 18 assorted tracks by Alexander Robotnick, the man that took Italo’s pure electronic base and completely stripped all of the cheesiest elements from it, leaving us with a dark robotic monster beautifully tunneling into the night. Sure, he touches on pop forms—the sly, wriggling “Mexicana” and the slightly goofy “Appuye Sur Le Champignon,” but he also breaks out with the rattling, sparse electro of the two-part “In the Krypta” tracks. The material here is split about halfway between dance tracks and spartan synth noodlings, many of which could soundtrack a Bava flick or serve as a primer in Arp programming. As an overall release, it’s nothing like a coherent album. But for those of us seduced by the allure of knobs, patch cords and waveform generators, this is an indispensable archive of one of the key figures standing at the nexus point of electronic dance music.

Crème Organization / CD 003
[Mallory O’Donnell]