Future Thursday

Future Thursday

September 10, 2020 — Leave a comment

If you know Dance music, enough said: “Ten Percent” was the first commercially available 12-inch single.

• Double Exposure – Ten Per Cent (Special Disco Mix) (i.e. the Walter Gibbons mix)

A little bit more info from the YouTube description on the “DiscoSaturdayNightTV” channel:
In 1976, Salsoul Records released their eighth release, Walter Gibbons’ remix of Double Exposure’s disco song “Ten Percent”. “Ten Percent” was the first commercially available 12-inch single.
The actual title of this record is Ten Per Cent, not Ten Percent.
The 12-inch single was reserved for DJs until the release of “Ten Percent.” Disco had already begun to exploit the 12-inch’s allowance for higher volumes, better sound quality, and longer playing time, but no record companies had previously seen commercial value in the new format.
Ken Cayre, the head of Salsoul Records, decided to sign a number of famous musicians and bands to the label, hoping to “consolidate the success of the faceless Salsoul Orchestra”, and Double Exposure was chosen as the newly signed band whose first release, “Ten Percent,” would feature the orchestra and be promoted with a 12-inch single as well as the typical seven-inch format. Walter Gibbons was a DJ, not a producer, but his innovative skills, along with his punctuality and serious nature, got Gibbons the “Ten Percent” assignment at Salsoul Records. One of his original techniques was “taking two records and working them back and forth in order to extend the drum breaks,” a technique he applied to the “Ten Percent” mix, which displeased the original songwriter, Allan Felder, but which was supported by Salsoul in the front-page story in which Billboard magazine covered the release. It was “mostly an exercise in stretching the original track out,” and Gibbons transformed it from a “four-minute song into a nine-minute-forty-five-second-cut-and-paste roller coaster.”
When Gibbons first played the “Ten Percent” 12″ remix at Gallery21, where he was a regular DJ, one witness said “it sounded so new, going backwards and forwards. It built and built like it would never stop. The dance floor just exploded.”
Double Exposure is an American, Philadelphia-based disco and soul group. They are best known for their 1976 hit, “Ten Percent”.
The group formed in 1961 with Leonard “Butch” Davis, Chuck Whittington, Jimmy Williams and Joe Harris. They were originally known as the United Image and released two singles, “Love’s Creeping Up on Me” on Stax Records in 1971 and “The African Bump” on Branding Iron Records in 1972.
They were signed to Salsoul Records in 1975 and released their debut album, Ten Percent in 1976. The album featured the title track, which was remixed by Walter Gibbons and reached No. 54 on the Billboard Hot 100 and No. 2 on the dance/disco charts. The tracks “Everyman (Has to Carry His Own Weight) and “My Love Is Free” were also popular club songs.
In 2001, a dance group called M&S used samples from Double Exposure’s “Everyman” in their song called “Salsoul Nugget”.
https://blog.discogs.com/en/the-history-of-the-12-inch/

Future Thursday

August 27, 2020 — Leave a comment

“[When Daft Punk played Coachella] Everybody in the music business, including all the Rock people who had for years and years and years been like ‘What’s the big deal? I don’t get it. Why isn’t that guy on stage doing anything? Where are the guitars?’ … THEY GET IT FOR THE FIRST TIME.”— Michaelangelo Matos

Daft Punk – Burnin’ / Too Long (Alive 2007)

I choose to look at this not as “the birth of EDM”—which was a cultural tragedy—and more as a technical culmination of about 30 years of electronic dance music. Forget about the lights and props for a minute, just the way that Daft Punk took live remixing/performing to another level is a thing of beauty.

Future Thursday

August 20, 2020 — Leave a comment

I think this might be the only song on Future Thursday that I can’t see as being from the future. Why is it in this category, then?

Nostalgia.

At the time this came out, NOTHING in Latin America sounded or looked like this: the concept of joking while still making serious music was brand new for Latin America, save for very limited exceptions. I’m too tired to expand on this right now but let’s just say that, in Latin America, due to class-relations and a culture strongly entrenched in Spanish colonialism it’s very difficult for bands to be truly rebellious. (Rebellion sometimes just means being free to have fun and make silly music and videos.)

But make no mistake, these are serious musicians. There was something about this where, behind a really strange, fake, over-produced (camp) form there was an undeniably funky substance. There was no synth game like this in Latin America (of course there’s the old Latin Jazz masters such as the ones in Irakere but, for all intents and purposes, that’s a different “Latin America”). And this also the most noticeable usage of drum machines, sequences and samplers in the mainstream (might as well have been the first time); it didn’t feel like a Rock band who tried to sound modern in between practising with “real instruments”. This WAS modern, this WAS new.

[Sorry for using the term “Latin America” so many times, too tired to write more elegantly …]

• Plastilina Mosh – Mr. P. Mosh

Future Thursday

August 13, 2020 — Leave a comment

How amazing this is and, in fact, what it is can’t be explained with words. This “song is great” doesn’t begin to cover it, in fact this “song” might not even be “good” …

In every great album/mix/performance, there is a point when go to a different level: it’s about rhythm not “beat”, sonics not “recordings”, mood—what is mood, really?. It’s about a higher state of consciousness reached through what our verbal language calls “music”. That is what this is. And that is likely not clear from this—indeed it is not possible to do that—but that’s why this was created to be listened to and not talked about; listen to it and you may say “that makes sense”.

I was lucky enough to see it live, dropped at the right time, in the right way, and it was one of the greatest experiences I’ve ever had. Funny thing is that I don’t even remember it that well, it’s a hazy drug-filled memory—and I didn’t take any drugs. But, barely remembering it probably makes me understand it more as the words of the song ring evermore true: just remember to fall in love, there’s nothing else.

• The Chemical Brothers – Swoon

Future Thursday

July 2, 2020 — Leave a comment

This was at the height of the sewage fire called “EDM” (instagram kids turned popstars dancing in front of turntables posing for pictures, throwing cake, etc). Underworld came back and showed what it was really all about.

I don’t know (or care) if Karl is a homosexual but in America—for all its forced inclusivity and pro-minority censorship—this whole thing looked “weird” and “gay” and not in the cool, marketable, sense. So having this on television was, in a non-self-conscious way, a political statement; a bigger one than cheap politics can deliver. (Which is what Moby never understood.) I think this was their first and only appearance on American television. (Big ups to Jimmy Fallon for showing them respect and engaging the crowd for them at the end.)

“Punk became subservient to the music industry. It offered rebellion and outsider culture but didn’t deliver it, whereas Rave and Dance culture didn’t even promise it but delivered it.” — Karl Hyde

• Underworld — Always Loved A Film