Genre
From the American floor to an Italy producing for export. The side we care about is where dancing gets made with machines and very little money.
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Selection Disco
Cosmic
Eight records
The cosmic was Italian. The records weren't. Eight tracks Daniele Baldelli played at Cosmic between 1979 and 1984, all named by him, coming from England, New York, Germany and Bologna, and held together by nothing except a booth on Lake Garda.
Selection Disco
City pop
Ten albums
Ten Japanese records from 1980 to 1986, in date order. Read from their catalogue entries they say two things the sleeves don't: not one was pressed outside Japan, and three of them we can't find on Spotify.
Selection Disco
Walter Gibbons
Mixed with Love
In 1976 a twenty-two-year-old DJ walked into a studio with three hours and a razor blade, and walked out with the first twelve-inch single ever put on sale. Five of his mixes in date order, with what the producers whose records he took apart had to say.
Selection Disco
Napoli Segreta
NG Records
Neapolitan disco and funk from between 1977 and 1982, pressed in tiny runs and then gone. Three selectors went looking for them in flea markets and put nine per volume back into circulation: four of those, and the work it took to be allowed to release them.
Genre Disco
Italo disco
Before the name
For nearly ten years Italy produced dance music for export that had no name in Italy. A German distributor named it while looking at his shelves, and today that name means the opposite of what it meant then.
Disco here means music built for the floor before the radio: twelve-inch singles, long versions, tracks made so a DJ can get in and out of them. It is functional music, and the part we care about is where the function produced inventions rather than formulas.
The Italian case makes the point. Between the late seventies and the middle of the eighties, Italy was turning out dance records aimed mostly at foreign markets, sung in approximate English under names chosen to sound Anglo-American. The term italo disco came from Germany, from a distributor who had to file them. Those twelve-inches are now worth more than the million-sellers released in the same months.