Kelley Polar - Love Songs of The Hanging Gardens (Environ CD05)

Cred Disco
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Giorgio Moroder
Chic
Larry Levan
Donna Summer
some Soul Jazz comp...

Pop/Mainstream-to-cheese Disco
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Saturday Night Fever OST
Boney M

Leftfield/Rediscovered Disco (& Italo-Disco)
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Disco-not-Disco compilations
Arthur Russell (rereleases)
I-f - Mixed Up In The Hauge
Morgan Geist - Unclassics

Tim, there's absolutely a disco canon, but nobody talkes about "albums". Sure there were great disco albums, but that was never the point. Hell, I'd say many disco canon albums are just compilations anyway.

re: fandango's list...

I'd say Unclassics is absolutely anti-canon. That was the whole point. Songs that never made it, that weren't necessarily hits, either big hits in the 80s or retro hits today so much.

Because I think these issues - which records to buy, where to start - are the reasons that fewer people check out the canon w/ a genre like disco.

That was probably the question I was answering (in a roundabout way) :)

http://disco-disco.com/
http://www.discomuseum.com/

But you have to think about the way people think about disco as well, how much of it is based on the label, and therefore I come back to what I said about compilations. And I'm not talking about recent compilations, but even of the moment stuff from Salsoul or Prelude, "special full length versions for DJs" double LPs are pretty standard fare.

An album like this might give you a lot of hits, but how many people would think that it represents a "canon?" "Canon" connotes that the music has a general critical approval and I don't know as that many people would associate a mainstream disco hits comp with this.

These are ubiquitous comps with massive critical approval. I'm sorry Tim, maybe I don't get at what you're getting at. I mean, here's a weird analogy...which is more "canon", the Count Five or Music Machine's LPs or their hit singles as compiled on (and "canonnized" by) Nuggets?

If anyone asked me about the disco canon, I wouldn't suggest the Phreak LP or a Change LP or something, but send them to any of the many defining compilations, as mentioned above some vintage, and some new.

when did disco ever have general critical approval?

ha! of course Tim was there first. But yeah first thing that came to mind when I put this on "I got to words for you: Two Pages!" I tend to think of these sort of albums as dead-ends but sublime dead-ends.

same thing with any genre though, no?

re the idm question: one of mark mac's recording aliases is nu era and he put out the "broken techno" ep under that name, the sound of which is not so far off from idm. it's also maybe a better name for the whole genre anyway!

my favorite tune on the aforementioned ep is called "1979" which shares sample source material with morgan geist's brilliant "lullaby" so there is some connection there (although if you know the sampled tune in question it would be pretty easy to connect every musician ever together through six degrees of kraftwerk). :D

This whole discussion has been interesting to watch unfold. It seems to me like there are competing understandings of what a genre is that underlie this thread; maybe what some people are treating as a *categorical fact about the music* should really be thought of as a *way of listening* to music. To be specific: I think there are "IDM-ish" things to listen for in the early disco canon (the dubbier and more effects heavy the better, the more detuned the synths get the better, is there a phaser on the hihat, if so rad etc) just as there is a "tech-house" ish way to listen to early reggae (extra feedback in the delay, weirdly eq-ed hi hats, white noise hiss during dropouts). It doesn't mean that all along early disco was just waiting to evolve into IDM or that all along the end point of Keith Hudson was Rhythm & Sound. I know genre serves a purpose (where does it go in my library? where does it go in my record store?) but it has limits, and often the interesting cases are the marginal ones. When it started up as something people talked about "IDM" occupied a fluid, negotiable, marginal space between other, older genres (not industrial, not dancefloor, not ambient) and arguably IDM died once it took on enough of a family resemblance to actively attempt to constitute its own genre. Long live confusion / mutate or die . . .

Not to drop a dime and be all old timerish but it reminds me of a club night at Static in San Francisco years ago, I think 98 or 99 or so; Matmos played and Morgan Geist Djed. Morgan played amazing music but he was just way ahead of the stuck up IDM kids in the crowd who were like "what is this diva disco stuff, I want Autechre etc. blah blah blah"- they weren't able to make the connection, they weren't hearing what Morgan was hearing in the classic early disco he was playing.

4hero were paying lots of attention to the geist/curtin/titonton school of fussy, busy, bubbly techno just before they went broken beat ("the deepest shade of...")

i like drew's comments on the IDM *way of listening*, sadly, i think that another thing that happened "when IDM died" was that (concurrently) there developed an IDM *way of consuming* dance, a sort of joyless snobbish collection-polishing, an anxiety about skimming only the cream from the top of the dance heap.

the deepest shade comp always seems to come up in these discussions...

i am listening to the new electric institute comp as i type and it's pretty great. it is too bad that it is so obscenely priced. some tracks do indeed remind of kelley polar via the mid-period plaid commentary on this thread.

Did this way of consuming not exist before 2002 ("when IDM died")? And isn't it the sort of accusation that we can all make of eachother till hell freezes over?

And by the way, "Mambo y Coro" by La Banda Chula is awesome!

If you really just mean people who wait for e.g. Soul Jazz to retrospectively legitimise a genre like house music, then fine, yeah, I think a little bit of cynicism is allowed. But only because house has already been retrospectively legitimised (and, indeed collated and canonized) so many times that waiting for Soul Jazz to come on board seems like the imposition of absurdly high "standards" (we may as well wait for Marshall Jefferson to be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame).

But if you mean something broader - like following buzz or looking for good comps that people agree are trustworthy - then I think it's a bit of an unrealistic criticism.

We all use tactics of discrimination, both to prevent ourselves from going broke and to allow ourselves to focus on the stuff we like. The question is not whether we discriminate or not, but whether our specific tactics are sound or not.

you know you're buying too much music when you have to start using music itself as currency! (the electric institute comp was worth every penny, BTW. i've been listening to it nonstop since i bought it. it is one of the best non-mixed comps i have heard this year. the track selection and flow are perfect together; melodic stealth and song forms that get weirder and trackier as the comp progresses. it has ace unreleased 69 and mayday remixes to boot.)

if we're not constantly questioning and reevaluating how we hear and classify music then something is missing IMO. or maybe it's when genre ossifies, eventually shatters and gets mixed up to restart all over again.

Haha, but does Jess Harvell like her?

Word! It's like Chanticleer!