Here's a re-edit of jazz-funk organist Ronnie Fosters 1978 trip on a percussion-fueled boogie airplane which apparently crash-landed in Copenhagen, got picked up by local digger Jens Dahl and re-built into a working machine, ready to fly again.
My buddy Jens Dahl Thomsen is coming over from Copenhagen on saturday to play some quality boogie & sleeze, as the flyer states we’ll be taking it to THE MAX over at Far i Hatten (Folkets Park) from 22:00 to 01:00. Check us OUT! The flyer/club is a hommage to the electronic funk group Xavier and their hit Do It To The Max from 1983,where in the video this matchbox reveals that they're all actually hanging out at a hip joint called The Max. Very meta!
SATURDAY: 22-00 CITY: MALMÖ FAR I HATTEN: FREE ENTRANCE MUSIC: YES, PLENTY!
Bagen was a hip MTV-style show on swedish public service TV in the mid-1980's, hosted by the ever so charismatic Cia Berg (front figure in the band Ubangi and later on in the 90's band Whale), check out a collage of some of Cias "looks" during the different shows here.
One of the features of the show except to supply the latest music videos of the time was a segment called Freak Out, where Stockholm B-boy Karl Dyall would give informative examples of breaking, locking and making fun of asians (no kidding, just check out his opening act in thisclip!).
SVT also managed to put out this amazing record of some of the music that was made exclusively for the show, most of it produced by the prolific former prog-rocker Coste Apetrea. There's plenty of good stuff in the way of electro and boogie, and the Mikael Rickfors track is a cool and dark piece that could stand to be compared with some of Angela Werners best stuff.
One noteble track is also the CCC version of Kool Katt, the cheesy rap-boogie hit by the group STOP (there's a nice edit of the original out there by our Norwegian neighbour Rune Lindbaek). This version on the other hand tones down on the cheese and adds more ice in the way of L.A.-electro style drum machines. Oh and the record comes with an instructional poster on how to breakdance and do the electric boogie.
More Kurt! Thanks to my good old friend Anton up in Umeå, I recently got a hold of the wierd and rare Hauenstein boogie disco cut It's All Nike (which I've mentioned here earlier). Bought cheap from a deadstock of records up in my hometown, the copy is in surprisingly good condition. Not much is known about this 1984 single, especially nothing about the puzzling fact that the obvious theme of this one-off project is to either cash in on or help promote the sports company Nike and its (at the time) trendy sneakers. It's possible that in Germany at this time the Nike brand was not the household name it is today and therefore provided an exotic namedropping opportunity for the task of emulating the musical esthetics of American disco boogie and the hip streetculture associated with it.
Bubblegum-baselines jump right out of the amps while Kurt rocks the synthesizers in a proto-skwee style and it's all good, it's all Nike.
In 1984 Kurt lended a hand to Supermax backup-vocalist and percussion player Larry London, producing the album Rockets under the name London Aircraaft. The more boogie/80's soul-vibe may be seem far from the Supermax sound, but when the synthesizer line of Supergirls kicks in it is unmistakeable whose signature it bears. The laidback groove of Angie is also a superb bass heavy Hauenstein-track that fits perfectly in the slicker suit of London Aircraaft. In the same year as this album came out, Larry and Kurt also released a single of a cover of Kurts Supermax-hit Love Machine.
Other projects Kurt managed during the late 1980's are the hard-to-find singles of Nike (with Frank Bülow, later with Culture Beat) and Crazy Coconut, which featured Kurts daughters Judi and Nicola. The Disco Academy has not been able to track down these records unfortunately.
As you may know, I've got a soft spot (and very high cheese-tolerance) when it comes to the music of the disco era produced in my native country Sweden. I think at least every third post here at the Academy is tagged "scandinavian". So I was awe-struck when I discovered Lovebugs mix Up North themed entirely around scandinavian disco & boogie of the 1980's. It's just so good I kind of wish I had made it myself. Somewhat reminiscent of the Top Nice-teams Svenska Pärlor mix I posted some time ago now, this mix focuses solely on the kind of pop-boogie sound that many have linked to the Sir Lancelot label. Some of these bands (Extra, Mantraction) could have been labeled new wave, but it seems to have been all a blur during those crazy pastell-coloured years. The odd number is definitley the christian disco of De'Funkar. Lovebug is part of the german radio/club outfit Bleepgeeks located in Ulm, which also has an exceptional blog stuffed with obscurities.
In 1978, only a year after Giorgio Moroder unleashed his futuristic smash hit on Swedish discoteques (you know the one where Donna Summer feels love) - drummer Åke Eriksson conviced his bandmates in the boogie rock outfit Wasa Express to record this tounge-in-cheek take on the italo disco sound, humoristicly done with nonsense lyrics and high-pitched smurf-like chants. But to judge from the outcome of this playfull mock hommage, it seems they might have found themselves actually enjoying it. Why else would they have spent their precious time away from the safe poses and riffs of their regular rock'n'roll repertoire to deliver such a spaced out excursion of disco perfection.
Again, I have to give credit to our friend V! (Oozlum) for spotting this one.
To tell you the truth, I really don't know who Mystic is. I was searching for this particul song and found a random and seemingly anonymous download link of this pretty awesome edit. And since I can't find any other information about this mystery editor I guess he really lives up to his (or her?) name. The original is an oriental flavoured disco boogie cut from 1978 by the same producer that would later go on to cut some serious latino cheese with Kaoma. But here, Jean-Claude Bonaventure really nails the groove with that sitar. The Panama project (which also included prolific drummer Serge Haouzi who worked on all the Martin Circus albums as well as the Zebra record together with Bonaventure) later went on to record a very tribal percussion trip of that Doobie Brothers song.
I long discarded this as a too-cheesy italo project without even having heard it, but when I came across the full album recently it struck me that this is something completely different. Just the sparse yet funky intro (Curt Cress on the drums!) sets you into the sleezy mode that the cover so ingeniously portrays. This is the kind of cut you would likely hear in a Mark Seven mix, neatly placed alongside Stars 'N' Bars.
Åke "Kråkan" Nilsson had an on and off musical career between working for his fathers carpeting company, which he eventually took over. You can see him hard at work here on the sleeve for the 1980 album Lyftet. He now operates dance courses in Åkersberga. This boogie-monster of a track, eluding to the swedish porno magazine Lektyr, is a sleezy but witty wordplay of rhymes where the natural association to various swedish words for certain body parts is substituted and censored with a drum break, only to break the build up of uttering a dirty word by throwing it into a completely different direction when the groove picks up again. Björn Skifs did a similar prank on his disco-dabbling effort Hela Natten Lång, when a simulated orgasm turns out to be just a sneeze.
A dedicated passion for the plastic and paper that conjure the dream of cosmic analogue cheesy discoteques: The Disco Academy isonehalfblog,onehalfguerrilarecordstore.Youcanfindour permanentcrate at the Rundgång Record Store in Malmö, Sweden (on Kristianstadsgatan 14).
