Space Disco
Cosmic Disco’s Unusual Suspects -Todd Terje, Lindstrom, Diskjokke
Written by Alex Macpherson – Thurs. May 9th.
It is known as the “roof of Oslo”, and the Stratos club – situated on the 12th floor of the city’s imperiously looming functionalist Folketeateret building – feels like an appropriate venue to host a milestone of Norway’s space disco scene. It is the hottest ticket at the annual by:Larm festival – a live collaboration between three of the genre’s trailblazers, Lindstrøm, Todd Terje and DiskJokke, appearing on stage together for the first – and, if they are to be believed, last – time.
For 15 minutes, the three men essay an ambient drone, its shifts and slow builds so gradual they are almost to the point of imperceptibility. One begins to fear the worst. None of the men on stage are strangers to either longueurs – Lindstrøm’s 2008 album Where You Go I Go Too consisted of just three tracks, and clocked in at 55 minutes – or, it must be said, to a penchant for happy self-indulgence.
While they thankfully eschew widdly guitar solos and fondness for goblins, an aesthetic kinship to prog rock tends to loom large over cosmic disco. Mindful of this, the crowd – aware that an ill-advised scheduling clash means they are missing Lindstrøm’s partner in crime, Prins Thomas, play at a venue across town – begin to shuffle their feet. Ambient drones may have their place – but this is not it.
One of the trio’s strengths is how they reconcile these recondite tendencies with an equally unashamed crowd-pleasing streak, turning indulgence into pure hedonism. And so it plays out: a quarter of an hour in, the beat drops – the classic dancefloor pressure release, magnified by a hundred. Thence, the trio lead us on a trip of electric piano stabs, gobbling bass, anthemic disco vocal samples and grand, ever-rising chord sequences. At the half-hour mark, they detour into riotous house piano madness and shamanistic chants.
The moment that sums up the set, though, comes at the 45-minute mark. With the deceleration process begun and the crowd reluctantly facing the set’s imminent end, the beat drops out – and then Terje, who had been half-hidden behind one of the mountains of equipment, pops his head up. He grins – and then brings the beat back in for a last, glorious go-round. It’s a mark of how much their willingness to play to a crowd’s pleasure receptors happily coexists with their love of disappearing into their own heads.
Dance subgenres have notoriously short shelf lives, held to the whims of their audience’s neophilia and the need for trends to keep mutating. By rights, six years on from Lindstrøm’s game-changing club anthem I Feel Space, the wave of cosmic disco it ushered in should be growing moribund. Yet not only does the sound continue to thrive – thanks to newer labels such as Permanent Vacation and Claremont 56 as much as their progenitors – so, too, do the reputations of its original forebears.
Not that Lindstrøm, Terje or DiskJokke seem tied to it any more – indeed, it is their restlessness and drive to push ever further outwards with their music that now defines them. One never knows quite what to expect from them. Take Lindstrøm’s output over the past three years: that epic three-track suite in 2008; a 45-minute version of Little Drummer Boy at Christmas the following year; then last year, just to keep us on our toes, Real Life Is No Cool – a collaboration with vocalist Christabelle full of pop-friendly hooks and feel-good melodies that, at times, sounded uncannily like Off the Wall-era Michael Jackson.
That an artist’s personality turns out to be at odds with their creations shouldn’t be surprising – but nonetheless, the gap between his effortlessly expansive feel-good music and the tall, rangy Hans-Peter Lindstrøm’s self-effacing awkwardness is hard to fathom. His answers are punctuated with a constant, apologetic refrain of “I don’t know,” and reveal a startling lack of the confidence one might expect a man so praised to possess. “In the process while working, I’m having fun and it’s interesting to see where everything is leading me,” he says. “But when I’m getting closer to finishing a song or an album, my self-confidence really gets lower, because I’m starting to think about what other people think.” While finishing Real Life Is No Cool, he admits to anxiety that “people would shout ‘sell-out’”.
But surely the plaudits he’s received have gone some way to assuage these feelings? “To be honest, I think it’s getting worse,” Lindstrøm replies, sounding rather miserable. “In the beginning it was easy, because no one was expecting anything. It’s easy to start from scratch – because the world is yours and there are no fears. But as long as you know there are people looking forward to your next move … it’s kind of scaring me.”
This unhappy paralysis may be Lindstrøm’s default state of mind at present: he is working on his second solo album proper, due for release later this year – or when he figures out what it will sound like, anyway. He ums, aahs and stutters again when pressed on it: “I’m really not sure, I don’t know exactly how it’s going to be … I really like working on it. When I’m progressing anyway, and not banging my head against the wall. I should probably just finish it and stop worrying … I don’t know, I might still scrap the whole project. I’m not sure if my self-confidence is the best for the moment.”
One almost feels guilty for questioning him. Unsurprisingly, though, he loosens up when the conversation moves into more typical music nerd territory: synths and their sounds, his wide-ranging enthusiasm for other artists (“Frank Zappa, Sun Ra, classic pop from Barbra Streisand and Barry Gibb”), his own life as an obsessive music fan: “I guess I’m just curious by nature – when you discover a new song or new artist, you get into a big spiderweb of information, you just want to know more about it.”
The boldness and range of Lindstrøm’s projects has led to their being received as artistic statements on a grand scale, but he denies he ever sets out with a specific plan in mind other than “trying not to repeat myself”, ascribing his restlessness instead to a “happy accident approach” that keeps his perfectionism in check. By contrast, DiskJokke says: “Hans-Peter is very much focused on surprising, but I don’t mind doing things that have been done before – because I haven’t done it before. As soon as I explore something, I don’t want to play around with it. As a kid I liked to construct things and look at them – then go on to something else.”
This year, that’s exactly what DiskJokke – a former maths student named Joachim Dyrdahl, who cites the experience of “flying through the clouds” as his most important inspiration – has done. His new album Sagara is an ambient gamelan suite, which has wound up featuring no actual gamelan. Contra his compadre’s instinctual methods, though, Sagara arose from a specific commission – one that sounds like a once-in-a-lifetime fantasy for any artist.
In 2009, the Norwegian festival Øya commissioned DiskJokke to create a one-off piece to be performed live, and gave him the resources to travel anywhere in the world to find the right collaborators, who would be flown back for the performance. (The performance retained the gamelan orchestra, but the gap between that and the music Dyrdahl had already laid down in the studio meant little trace of them wound up on the recorded album.)
Even now, he still sounds as though he can’t quite believe this opportunity was real. (It owes its existence largely to the Norwegian government’s sponsorship of music: Øya receives a multi-year grant from the national arts council, which budgeted 126.3NOK (around £14.3m) for music last year.
Initially, DiskJokke’s plan was to make a dance record: he researched Colombian cumbia and Brazilian samba, among many other global styles, while his label manager pushed for him to go to Mali to work on the project. Nothing was satisfactory, and DiskJokke realised the flipside of his dream opportunity: “I was really stressed. When you can have anything, you’re not sure what you want.” The breakthrough came when he realised he wasn’t looking for another rhythm section – “That’s what I would be doing anyway” – but something more textural.
The more he pondered it, the more the relations between gamelan and electronic music seemed worth exploring – particularly their parallel inducements of a state of hypnosis. “Some of the patterns, some of the pace and the patience of it was familiar,” he says backstage at by:Larm. So he went to Indonesia. “We took the car for three hours out of Bandung into the wilderness to a traditional wedding in a big square. There were 27 to 30 musicians on stage, and played for three days! Non-stop! Duggu-duggu-duggu-duggu-duggu, like a prehistoric techno party.
We sat there for six hours, and I whispered: ‘Is it time to go?’ ‘Go? We just arrived!’” With perfect timing, Terje interjects: “That’s how we should have done this concert. We should have played for three days. We have so much material, I think we’d be perfectly able to do it. Chain ourselves to the stage.”
The final twist in the making of the album was yet to come, though. DiskJokke recorded it while in the process of splitting up with his long-term girlfriend – and eventually leaving her and their baby daughter. “I chose to leave,” he explains. “We were always arguing; we tried everything. I had to do something; it was the best choice. The last track was made the day I moved out. I was crying for three days as I made it. It sounds strange, but I can’t really remember what happened.”
The track, Panutup, is one of those closers whose shift in sound suddenly casts the dark, harmonic drones that precede it in a different light, like a slightly adjusted rear-view mirror. It’s where the light breaks through the hypnosis, with the sudden entry of chiming melodies and beats – the most recognisably DiskJokke track on Sagara. “I had grief and hope at the same time,” he reflects. “Just working with those clear sounds, the harmonic changes, was very fulfilling. Go in the studio, be angry, make something evil … then shape it into something nicer.” It almost sounds like a space disco manifesto.
Space Disco, Cosmic House…Whatever
Top: Prins Thomas Bottom: Lindstrom
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.
