Wednesday, March 12, 2008  12:22 am 

Studio 2O54

Codek are fast becoming a label with liquid gold running through its cyborg veins, a label so awesome that its disco releases transcend sound itself and become feelings and colours. Here is something black and blue:

Harmonika Lyder - Siegfried Der Drachentoter

The Sounds Superb 12″s are both 4 track discs of pure Studio 54 rebuilt on the nebula brilliance, cast deep into pits of echoing mystery, but that’s always a winner where this kind of greatness is concerned. We brought you Oblio’s ‘Escape’ in an earlier post with its new dawn fading introduction and subsequent creeping stutter-throb, but its Vol.2 that Harmonika Lyder hails from. Some say that these one off artists are all In Flagranti in a flimsy disguise but no official confirmation has been made, just scurrilous blog-based hissings, so we cannot speculate on such rouses.

“Siegfried Der Drachentoter” is a sophisticated fractured mess that breaks in and out of a solid beat like a playful laser-guided dragonfly. You could lay Jean Michel Jarre’s “Oxygene IV” over it at 78 rpms and the two would assimilate like that horrid Virtual Reality love scene in Lawnmower Man, but y’know this would be sexier. It seems to be some sort of love lament from R2-D2 and is probably a hot edit of a long forgotten cosmic 12″ from the 70’s that only the black disco gods of space-beat, Lovefingers, would recognise.

Time to take the mood down now; let it calm like the cyan oceans breaking up the glaciers on Neptune. We give the crunching and looping machines a rest and let the world around us take over as a fiery-eyed Coyote floats in on a pea-green sail boat. Round its neck a small speaker attached to a opal encrusted collar, which emits soothing sounds of Balearic freefalling love.

We have been privy to conversations while sitting in dimly-lit tavernas on the subject that out of the current crop of cosmic disco behemoths (Aeroplane, Lindstrom, Peter Visti etc.), Coyote isn’t cutting it. The general excuse it that not much goes on in the average 7 minutes it takes to listen to a track, but we defend with the argument that Cosmic Disco is something that requires a certain state of mind when listening, and we aren’t talking about drugs, we are just talking a patient appreciation. New 12″ “Going Out” lingers in our minds like the shapes that grow in your vision when you look away after staring at the sun. Its like an ascending inverted Satan, expelled from Hell, floating up to Heaven to enjoy such progressively obsidian sounds and clouded sites of beauty.

Coyote - Going Out

Last, but by no means least, we give you Richard Gateaux (most minimal Discogs entry EVER!), complete with new single “Dune”. An Arabic Martian musical plotline to an alternate Dune if it had had more money thrown at it, and was actually filmed on location in the planets that it was set.

Clearly mister Gateaux is a different form of Skatebard if he was Latino and not Scandinavian, but that’s where the comparisons end. Skatebard rules the 25th century robot world with a cyber enhanced fist (where is the next album?), but Richard is more in league with alien invaders that can only be seen with the mind’s eye, inhabiting desert worlds of azure sands where interlacing lines form a grid for space worms to do Battleship-styled wars upon.

Richard Gateaux - Dune

labels >> Cosmic, Coyote, In Flagranti, Richard Gateaux, disco, xxjfg