nona hendryx - transformation

nona hendryx - transformation

a black 80's-style icey robo-funk tune that could be a Grace Jones jam or something off "Let's Dance." Nona gives a laundry list of possible transformations in the modern age, including sex changes, bionic adaptations. 

Fitting for 2009, an era of upheaval and transition. The Obama administration is partly spinning crisis as opportunity: the chance to grasp the turning of history at its axis. The politics of crisis was documented by Naomi Klein in her book The Shock Doctrine, where she put forth the theory that conservatives in the Bush White House were taking advantage of widespread crises like post 9/11 terror threats and Hurricane Katrina to ram through radical programs in line with Straussin-derived right-wing ideology that they couldn't get the support for otherwise, such as massive privatizations of schools in post-Katrina New Orleans. Needless to say, Klein's theory is cause for alarm. But guess what? the Obama team is branding the economic crisis in similar rhetoric. It's distinctly in line with Klein's shock doctrine. Except rather than the being piloted straight into the jaws of hell by a crack team of Darth Cheney and his death squad of moral sociopaths, the White House is in the hands of the good guys for once. If they can spin the brink of economic ruin into a Newer-Deal era of hybrid cars, socialized health care and fiscal responsibility, so be it, sounds like a shock to the system worth taking. 

polygon window - surfing on sine waves

polygon window - surfing on sine waves

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ambient-acid techno landmark recorded by richard james aka aphex twin in the early nineties.

intuitive, dissonant, the minimal-psychedelic visions of a rare talent who possesses real creative foresight and a mozartian inclination for melodies seemingly written on nature's own treble clef. techno is alive, it breathes, it hypnotizes and terrorizes.

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the experiment does not care about you. experimental media is not interested in entertainment. it does not concern itself with repeating back to you the world as you believe you understand it. electronic music attracts those with an experimental temperment, because technology invites tinkering. a world of technology is governed by exploration, by blind discovery. It's a world of complete control, but also a complete lack of control. Increased technology means increased mastery over the manipulation of sensible information, like sounds and images, but it also means the possibility of withdrawing control, of finding new ways to allow the processes of manipulation to act upon and transfigure the world. 

it's often said that techno music is future music. the simple way to appreciate this is to hear techno sounds as being direct indices of future existence, soundtracks to digital life, with cyborgs and jet packs. the more nuanced way to appreciate this is to understand the future not as a pre-planned fate, the stuff of fifties flying-car advertisements, but a world that can never take place. 

The future as such can never happen. But concentrated slivers of it can explode into the grey calm of the present. Techno is not the future, but through its most experimental moments, it can point to the future. Its experimental instances, like 'surfing on sine waves,' point to the future by incarnating a new musical possibility. When a new possibility is incarnated, it repeats forms and elements that are already familiar, yet at the same time it projects an utterly strange and foreign sensibility. 'surfing on sine waves' sounds like early nineties acid techno on Warp records, but at the same time it sounds like nothing else. James is the quintessential mad-scientist of techno, a onetime engineering student whose machine obsession has long since mutated into an exploratory drive for the inner cosmos of electronic sounds, a haunting, unsettling realm, an inverted mirror world, a phantom space of black-box circuitry and artificial intelligence.

DISCONET PROGRAM SERVICE

Lama - Love Is On the Rocks (Disconet Remix)

Serge Santiago / on myspace

Serge Santiago is a London-based DJ. He used to be in Radio Slave. What's Radio Slave? Radio Slave is techno, it used to be a duo but now it's just Matt Edwards, who is also one-half of Quiet Village. Serge loves Italo disco, which in the history of dance music is the experimental turning point between disco and house, the point where dance music becomes electronic, but in a wild, hairy, very bearded mutation, like the part in "Metropolis" when the wizard dude makes a robot woman. 

Part from "Metropolis" Where Wizard Dude Makes a Robot Woman

So Serge loves italo re-edits, which I mean, who doesn't, really? One of his recent cuts is a re-working of "Love is on the Rocks" by Lama, a classic early-80s italo rarity. Do I have to mention that it's really good? Actually, I'll say this to you: if you don't know what 'italo disco' is, this is a smashing example. It's glitzy but spare, cheesily up-lifting, with echoey synths. It's about dancing silvery robots with lips and hips. If you were to have a conversation with a beardo master about rare synth-disco awesomeness, you could easily glide through it solely by saying "oh yeah, of course, 'love is on the rocks' by lama.' 

In doing research for a review of Serge's latest edit 12", I found out that there's another remix of this track, from back in the day, by an organization known only as DISCONET. 

It seems that Disconet was a subscription-based DJ service in the 70s-80s which would provide its customers with monthly LP compilations featuring exclusive remixes and medleys. I offer here some further images and choice quotes from djsportal.com concerning DISCONET.

"DISCONET was part of a New York based company called Sugarscoop - created as subscription program service with professionally selected and mixed disco music for discotheque DJs, mobile discos and radio stations. Program content was selected by DISCONET DJs from new disco releases made available by Record Companies which have licensed DISCONET to provide the service.

DISCONET is called as the "Granddaddy" of all remix services and provided mixed/segued DJ dance sets, not only to make the DJs job a little bit easier, but to expose club goers to new music. The DJs spinning at the height of the disco era were given access to a new creative tool - a different interpretation of current dance tunes to wow club goers."

DISCONET was invented by THIS MAN, MIKE WILKINSON, aka CAPTAIN MIKE

"During its second year, Disconet added more remixes and medleys by popular DJ's like: Bobby Viteritti, John "Jellybean" Benitez and Raul A. Rodriguez. The third year highlighted the first productions by Bill Motley & Trip Ringwald, who later start Moby Dick Records of Boys Town Gang fame. The first "Disconet Top Tune Medley" by John Matarazzo & Mike Arato was released as well: they produced "Top Tune Medleys" from 1979 to 1985 with the exception of 1982's Casey Jones' medley.

'Volume 3, Program 7' included the infamous Patrick Cowley's mix of Donna Summer's "I Feel Love" lasting 15:45 minutes, which was issued after Patrick's death in November 1982 by Casablanca Records."

As mentioned, these quotes are all from DJSPORTAL.COM, which is run by an erstwhile Polish music critic and enthusiast, the proprietor of a number of disco-history prorjects such as DISCO AID: "I would simply like to create special fund to help discotheque pioneers whose are

broke and need economical / life help."

for more info see: http://www.djsportal.com/en/pioneer/index.php?id=disconet

List of every Disconet release, including the respective "DJ NEWS" update for each:http://www.hotdiscomix.de/remix_services/disconet/mwdn0307djnews.htm