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Space Disco
Story by Dominique Leone

Space disco!…or cosmic house, or the way out, eclectic sounds of DJs who don’t mind throwing in the odd Can track or jazz-funk remix in the middle of their set. This is dance music informed not only by 30 years of disco records, but by every other record out there as well: There is no agenda to fit them all in, but at the same time, there is no rule that says you can only play one kind of music. Electro, fusion, prog, krautrock: Somehow, all of this exists in the same continuum of space music.

In fact, all of it does share a love of electronics, so perhaps the DJs and producers making new, galactic tracks are homing in on something electronic. Certainly, synthesizers are huge here, playing not only melodies and perpetually motive bass lines, but shimmering arpeggios and layers of silky, ambient noise. In one sense, it’s very retro, but in another, it’s perfectly contemporary, like listening to the record collection of your favorite hipster, the one who isn’t afraid to show she loves old Mike Oldfield records just as much as Giorgio Moroder or Neu!.

Of course, eclecticism was one of the founding principles of disco: DJs like Francis Grasso and Larry Levan didn’t just play one kind of music, but created wildly diverse sets that took club patrons on more fantastic trips than any single record could. It’s no surprise that space disco producers like Norway’s Todd Terje or UK duo Idjut Boys are concocting “re-edits” of some of the same disco staples the original DJs played way back when. Idjut’s Press Play mix is in fact comprised entirely of re-edits (of both old tunes and new ones), suggesting that their goal isn’t necessarily to define a new genre of music, but rather celebrate the greatness of one that never went away.

This too is an aspect of dance music with deep roots, via the live tweaking that the original disco DJs did to their records, through full-fledged 12-inch remixes and the “Baeleric” style forged in Ibiza in the mid-80s, using a varied mix of early house, rare grooves, Latin funk, hip-hop, and other underground dance music.

Still, there are some clear musical touchstones for space disco. Listening to songs like Lindstr¯m’s “I Feel Space” or anything by Dutch electro artist Freak Electrique, it’s hard to deny a similarity to early and mid-1980s Italo Disco. Italo was an Italian take (naturally) on electro and synth-pop, using many of the same electronic sounds and drum machine patterns, but usually a lot more over the top.

That is, where Kraftwerk and Moroder were sleek, Italo was bursting, often featuring wailing, vocoderized harmony vocals (see Mr. Flagio’s “Take a Chance”) and futuristic synth melodies (Kano’s “Cosmic Voyager”) that might have been as at home in a B-sci-fi flick as in a dance club, and has been popularized this decade in DJ mixes by Morgan Geist (Unclassics) and Dutch producer I-F (Mixed Up in the Hague, Vol. 1). Conversely, Italy’s concurrent Cosmic scene involved a group of DJs (most notably Daniele Baldelli, famed DJ at the club Cosmic in Northern Italy) who, while not supportive of Italo-disco, were making waves playing hyper-varied sets of electro, funk, Brazilian music and jazz fusion– again demonstrating a remarkable tendency to play anything so long as it moved the floor.

Similarly, today’s space disco practitioners (particularly producers like Chicken Lips’ Andy Meecham and Prins Thomas, who even named one of his tracks after Ash Ra Tempel’s leader Manual Gˆttsching) have mined krautrock, psychedelia, and prog for breaks and sound banks.

Most of the new music being classified as space disco comes out of Europe, though the Brooklyn-based label Whatever We Want Records (Quiet Village Project, Map Of Africa, Bobby Marie) produces stuff that fits into the cosmic rubric– and has a very fitting name! Even DFA Records arguably fits the bill, taking into account singles by Black Dice and Delia Gonzalez & Gavin Russom, though is hardly known for releasing stuff as spacey as the best Euro labels: Lindstr¯m’s Feedelity, Belgian nu-electro/Italo label Eskimo (home of the excellent Rub’N'Tug Present Campfire mix), Bear Entertainment/Bear Funk, Prins Thomas’ Full Pupp and UK labels Tirk and D.C. Recordings.