The Missing Link EP



Disco has meant a lot of things over its lifespan. Early on, it denoted a venue and a means—the nightclub, the DJ spinning according to his and the dancers' tastes. By the mid-'70s it became a style: swishing hi-hats, four-on-the-floor pound, synthetic like nylon (strings) or polyester (synthesizers), narcotic by default (and, OK, design), and most of all omnipresent. After that it was banished from current usage for a while even as the music it engendered, from Billie Jean to Holiday to Let the Music Play, owned the radio and clubs. It's the latter stuff that's occupies London DJ/producer Stevie Kotey on this very durable collection of . . . it feels sort of foolish to refer to Wunderbutt simply as re-edits, since what he does with his source material is as important as the material itself. Disco, after all, is an atmosphere as much as a continuum: a slow-tempo Sleeping Bag excursion and frantic Studio 54-era string-cheese glop equally evoke an era when licentiousness abounded. It certainly helps that Kotey's ear, on this evidence, leans heavily toward the off-kilter—he keeps us on our toes in more ways than one. Lucifer Went to Church is phased-and-faded space disco, literally—the sample source in the first couple of minutes seems to brown out every few bars. Torro De Butt cuts and pastes indolent bass phrases into a jagged but enticing whole that never quits sounding like it's just beginning to rev up. Morning Bump reconstitutes the classic Bo Diddley beat (shave-and-a-haircut, two bits) into something whose constituent parts (echoed voices uttering keep on, growling and glowering bass, production sheen like wet black PVC) sound utterly late-'50s, mid-'70s, and late-'00s, all at the same time. Disco Mudma revisits our old friend the jazzy guitar phrase from Black Science Orchestra's New Jersey Deep, but only as an occasional flourish atop a scratchy, bumptious groove that's already festooned with grunted Come on!s, videogame noises and piano that prances sideways. And Kotey does especially nice things with the glow-in-the-dark electro grooves of The Taste (Round & Brown) and Wunderbutt. Both tracks are idealized crossbreeds of Space Invaders and the NYC Peech Boys; both sound as much like right now as like 1982-or-so—disco and disco alike. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.