Tuesday, March 25, 2008  2:33 pm 

Love Saves The Day

Love Saves the Day kicks off on Sunday the 30th, with a taster on Friday the 28th for you London types, come to the Amalgamation of Champion Sounds party kindly put together by the winning Real Gold team. In this post we tell you quick about where we come from, and bring you some eternal tunes, just so you know what we’re about. Which. is. LOVE.

Enter Dan,

On Valentines Day 1970 David Mancuso opened the doors of his New York City loft apartment to 200 guests, summoned by a hand made invite. As befitting the date (as well as being a narcotic allusion) he called the party ‘Love Saves the Day’. It would go on to serve as a seminal template for the nightlife that would come to be called, disco.

Last October I put together a mix titled ‘Slow-disco’.

Dan Nixon - Slow-disco mix

It was the culmination of a couple of years discussion between friends about putting on a disco night. We’d been buying far too many records that simply didn’t have a home at any of the nights we played. These were records that didn’t fit a seated, cerebral appreciation (though some did), weren’t particularly ‘hip’ or in vogue (yet) and they were often attuned to the Gay roots of disco when our audiences weren’t. These were the records of our imagined New York / Berlin / Miami futures. A wonderful confluence of styles and sounds dedicated to the night. We called them slow-disco last year. In all honesty, they were what disco originally was, a collection of genres brought together to facilitate the dance, now matter how fast or, how slow.

So, let’s just call it Disco.

On Sunday March 30th we’re opening the doors of our Loves Saves the Day. We’ve managed to convince Heist, a bar on the central strip of Brighton’s mainstream clubbing Mecca - West Street, to give us their downstairs room. There’s something wonderfully perverse about occupying a space on a street synonymous with the plastic excesses of clubbing culture but we’re nothing if not lovers of the wonderfully perverse. The good people of Heist are clearing out the space for us, turning out the lights, opening its private entrance, and giving us carte blanche to create our disco futures.

Loves Saves the Day is a free party. Loves Saves the Day is a celebration and, as is customary for a celebration, we’re inviting people to attend. Indeed, it is strictly invite only. If you can’t get a physical invitation from us, you can get a virtual one by emailing your name to invitation@lovesaves.co.uk

Loves Saves the Day is a night for the committed, a night for those who love music and dancing and dressing up and don’t care if it’s Sunday, it’s 10pm and they’re covered in sweat and euphoria as light hits a mirror ball 10 feet underground. This is the spirit of a disco that never became the Bee Gees, that never became Studio 54, that never became a $4,000,000,000 industry and that never became passé - to be crushed under the foot of corporate rock & pop. This is a group of friends getting together to play music they love so people can dance.

…and you are all, cordially, invited.

——-

Jürgen Paape - So Weit Wie Noch Nie [2002]

The dancefloor is empty, the night is young but I’m warming up by playing some music I love. There’s a smattering of people along the side of the bar, mostly friends or acts, there are few people here to dance. Not that I mind, there’s something so right about dancing to So Weit Wie Noch Nie on your own.

I’d quickly got into the habit of mouthing the words I’d learned phonetically as the record played. Eventually, over the years, I’ve allowed myself out onto the dancefloor to sway along with its languid synth stabs, bubbling, insistent beats and glorious Theremin sound (indeed I’ve been known to indulge in a bit of air-Theremin). I can feel every compressed hand-clap, every chord change, those less compressed hand-clap fills just before the Theremin drifts in, Sonya Lübke’s* glorious vocal sliding over the returning beat…

It’s a record to live in. For five minutes you’re surrounded in the simultaneous embrace of Sonya Lübke’s purring voice and the starry blanket of the night. It’s always been a record I wish to enjoy with friends but, at the same time, when I shut my eyes and sway away, alone on the dancefloor, mouthing the words - it alone surrounds me.

That night one person made her way to the floor. I can’t even remember what she looked like but she only stayed for this song. (Dan)

*The 2002 version with the Sonya Lübke vocal was the first version I heard and still remains my favourite even if the Daliah Lavi sampling 2001 original is well worth seeking out.

A lot of disco edits are unnecessary and rubbish, but Todd Terje it seems has got it down by simply not messing around too much with tracks that were already pretty damn sweet to begin with.

He’s got the balance on this Chic disco love classic so perfect! In fact I think this might be the best edit I have ever heard…people must totally lose it when this gets played - all the different sections of this new mix now just hit you so hard! he’s sped it up ever so slightly and massively extended the intro and outro - letting the untouchable original bassline slowly build as all the other disco layers are added to create the perfect dancefloor killer, and the vocals…well holy shitaroo the vocals are the cherry on top of this disco sundae, actually no, thats the horns, the vocals are some sweet kinda drizzle sauce that makes the whole thing have that sexy “MMMMMMMM” vibe.

Any song that has the power to not only take control of your feet but also your arms and force them to play air-bass is pretty awesome in my book (Matt)

Chic- I want Your Love (Tangoterje Edit)

Panorama is a strange place, a totalitarian-looking colossal concrete box in the middle of nowhere. Inside, the tribes party until night becomes day. Hugo took me there on my last Aftermath Disco trip to Berlin, not because he liked it or because he thought I was going to like it, but because he thought I had to see it, and as usual, he was right. It was a wild business, sweaty people bouncing around to relentless techno beats of the unforgiving sort under the highest ceilings I have ever seen, bounding enormous windows whose shutters opened and closed at climactic moments showering the crazed crowd with the strobe of the sun shining triumphant outside.

We felt like the vampires at the end of From Dusk Til Dawn, damned and trapped inside a cage of metallic beats, stakes stabbing our chest, a net of machine music corseting hips into the mindless cycle of pumps drilling in the void, we roamed bewildered and lost, looking for something to nourish us, something alive. This something might have been outside in the sunrise, I might have seen it, it might have been a mirage, the kaleidoscopic unearthly pattern of butterfly wings fluttering just outside the grey walls of Panorama, creating the vibrations of an eternal Berlin sunrise, this music.

Daniel Wang- Berlin Sunrise

As far as 20jazzfunkgreats is concerned, Daniel Wang is one of the daddies, an incredibly talented producer and composer who lives disco music and pushes it forwards with keen mind, unchained creative spirit and, perhaps most importantly, his hands, pressing keys, manipulating switches and dials in what we imagine to be a Star Trek style console covered with synthesisers so as to begin a leisurely trip that goes through space, but returns to Planet Earth, zoom down through the clouds, a urban zone, a street into the window of a basement, between the shapes moving, through the skin, the beat of a human heart pumping blood through vessels into limbs that move, faster, dancing, there.

It’s not a revival thing. It’s about bringing the old and the new together with passion and respect, building a few signposts (morning- slow and balearic, afternoon- cosmic and mesmerising, evening- uplifting and euphoric, night- the stars are spinning with you) and joining the dots, the pattern of a constellation projected into the walls, read it, it says DANCE, because that’s what it is, nothing less and nothing more, if eyes are bright, smiles honest and, in the darkness, the body of dancers swings like one, then it is right, we get down, and afterwards we can rest satisfied. If not, keep searching, because people have it in them, and the music should bring it out, if you doubt that, then melt with this.

Black and proud.

Donald Byrd- Love has Come Around.

Bring it on, first heard in James Murphy and Pat Mahoney’s blinding Fabriclive, then fetched as sweet vinyl via Juno. (Juan)

Join us at:

Loves Saves the Day

P.S.

p.p.s.

The excellent folks at Allez Allez put up our little Schuss mixtape up, go and check it out, the tracklist is as follows:

Angelo Badalamenti - laura’s theme (twin peaks OST)
Tangerine Dream - guido the killer pimp
Barry de Vorzon - the warriors
Fuckbuttons - bright tomorrow
John Carpenter - the duke arrives
Syclops - where’s jason’s k
Belle Epoque - bamalama (lee douglas edit)
Ginno Soccio - dancer
Jan Hammer - crockett’s theme (minimix)
Daft Punk - short circuit
Mahavishnu Orchestra - open country joy
Selda - meydan sizindir
Carly Simon - why (extended mix)

This shit is gold, and we love it.

labels >> Chic, Daniel Wang, David Mancuso, Donald Byrd, Jürgen Paape, Love Saves The Day