Chaz Jankel / Real Genius

Chaz Jankel - Glad to Know You (Todd Terje re-edit)

Resident Advisor interview with Chaz Jankel

keyboardist for UK rockers Ian Dury & the Blockheads in the 80s. Jankel had a number of 80s wonky disco hits (like "Spasticus Autisticus" with Dury) and his works are currently getting new exposure to the weirdo disco re-edit beard-wearing scene. They just reissued a 'best of' which features this re-edit by Todd Terje who is basically a trippy disco edit genius. This cut is super dubby and nicely spaced, good for standing on the dancefloor in a wobbly daze.

Chaz also had a song in the movie "Real Genius," which was a point of personal obsession for me as a young bookish misfit (nerd). While the real-life setting for RG's genius-nerd micro-realm was supposedly Caltech, it also neatly overlapped with my own boarding school experience at the Texas Academy of Math and Science.




Where two-thirds of the students were laced quite straight and the other third were the kind that dropped acid right before taking the SATs. It is also where, as a neophyte, I encountered a philosophical crisis: the suspicion that science doesn't think. That's what always annoyed me about it, slightly, and why at a tender age I forsook the lab for the library. That's to say science isn't concerned with reflecting on the conditions of its own possibility. You can't deny though how great math is, or the sheer beauty of its inhuman immortality: after all our cities lie in dust, math will still be there, like the cockroach.

Montage sequence from "Real Genius" feat. Jankel's "Number One"



The full "Number One" music video