I’ve listened to I don’t know how many records this week and have added well over a hundred songs to my music library as a result. I bought so many Moog albums it was ridiculous. I’m actually working on something about Moog albums for my other site that I hope you’ll find interesting.
I was going to write a guide to Osaka record stores, but I just didn’t have enough time to really dig into that place. I don’t want to half-ass it. I’m going to try and re-visit that city sometime soon, hopefully with a couple of visits under my belt I’ll be able to piece something together. There are a lot of amazing stores there, but also a lot of crap stores as well. Fortunately, most of the worst stores looked relatively new, so hopefully they’ll get their shit together or go out of business before they sully the good name of that wonderful city.
Now electro.
Grace Jones
Party Girl (Extended Remix)
Party Girl (Dub)
This was the one track by a mainstream artist that I found while shopping for records in Osaka. While my interest in crate digging for 12″ singles has waned in recent years (mostly because I literally have nearly every 12″ single I could ever want), I’m always on the lookout for more epicness by her majesty Grace Jones. In what turned out to be a theme for tonight’s post, “Party Girl” is a sparse electronic dance jam, very typical of Grace’s awesome 80s work. It was produced by Nile Rodgers, so yeah, it’s good.
Mya & The Mirror – Hesitation
Gina & The Flex – I Wanna Believe
I found both of these excellent tracks on a compilation called Fuzz Dance. The 12″ had four tracks in total, the other two being “Problemes d’Amour” by the legendary Alexander Robotnick and the absolutely brilliant “Check-Out Five” by Naif Orchestra. Both of those tracks have been re-issued many times over and are actually in-print at several digital storefronts, so I suggest checking them out.
These tracks haven’t had the same fortune, and have fallen into an even greater level of obscurity than the other ones. And that’s a shame, they’re dope electro/italo-disco cuts from the mid-80s that really exemplify how fun and wonderful that genre can be. Super upbeat, great grooves, amazing production, these tracks are tight as hell. I miss this type of dance music, it’s one of the reasons I’ve fallen hard off of the current EDM scene. It’s so big and the beats are overpowering. I feel that dance audiences today feel like they need a constant BOOM BOOM BOOM beat in order to dance. But they don’t! Minimal tracks like this prove that sometimes less is more. You just need a groove, man. I wonder if any gay dance clubs in Tokyo have a retro night…
Both of these acts didn’t really exist. They were manufactured names for producers. Mya & The Mirror is actually producer Maurizio Dami, featuring vocals by Mya Fracassini. Dami’s done a shitload of stuff over the years, while it appears that Mya went on to work in opera. The people being Gina & The Flexix were Gianni Sangalli, Marzio Benelli, and Giancarlo Bigazzi. Like Dami, they all produced, wrote and worked on dozens of dance tracks under countless aliases an in countless group projects.