Mutant Disco
Downtown New York playing disco badly, on purpose, and inventing something.
The pattern
2 bars, sixteenth notes. Loops until you stop it.
This is the emptiest grid on the page and it is meant to be. Three kicks per bar, on beat 1, the a of 2 and one more that moves, the and of 3 in bar one and beat 4 in bar two. Cross-stick on 2 and 4, dry, with one extra at 44 on the a of 3 in bar two. The hi-hat plays three closed hits per bar plus a single open, and the longest gap in the closed lane runs seven sixteenths, which happens twice. The agogo opens the bar at 90, the highest velocity in that lane, and plays a phrase rather than a pulse. Swing is nearly straight at 0.52 because these were bands playing rock time, not drummers with a shuffle in their hands. What no grid can hold is that the tempo on the source records moves by a beat or two per minute across a take, since nobody was playing to a click.
What it is
Around 1979 a group of bands in lower Manhattan who had come out of punk decided that disco was more interesting than what they had been doing, and started making it with the wrong instruments and no session players. ESG were four sisters from the Bronx with a borrowed kit. Liquid Liquid built their records on a single bass figure and a rack of hand percussion. Michel Esteban and Michael Zilkha's ZE Records put out the ones with the jokes in them. What they all share is subtraction: no four on the floor, no strings, often no chords, and enough silence in the bar that the parts sound like they are circling each other. Rap producers noticed immediately, which is how a Liquid Liquid bassline ended up as White Lines.
What it sounds like
Dry, small and startlingly empty. One bass guitar riff, repeated for five minutes without a chord change. A kit played hard with very few cymbals. Hand percussion, agogo bells and congas doing the melodic work the guitar would normally do. Where there is a vocal it is chanted, shouted or spoken by more than one person at once. The records were made cheaply on eight tracks, so everything is close-mic'd, panned wide and mixed loud, with the reverb coming from whatever room they were standing in rather than from a plate.
Key elements
- No four on the floorThree kicks a bar, one on beat 1 and the other two moving between bars. The absence of a steady pulse is what marks these records as post-punk rather than disco.
- A cross-stick backbeatThe stick laid across the rim rather than a full snare hit. Dry, wooden and quiet enough that the percussion stays in front of it.
- Bells carrying the tuneAn agogo or cowbell part with real intervals in it, playing the hook. It peaks at 90, sits level with the drums, and does the job of a lead instrument.
- Almost no hi-hatThree closed hats across a whole bar, plus one open. The gaps are the arrangement and filling them turns the record into ordinary disco.
- One bass riffFour or five notes, no chord change, no variation for the length of the track. Everything else is written against that loop.
How to get them
- Bass firstWrite the riff before anything else and play it on a real bass with a pick and the tone up. Roundwound strings, no compression, and leave the fret noise in.
- Cross-stickLay the stick on the rim with the shoulder resting on the head and hit it with the butt. If you are sampling, look for a side-stick rather than a rimshot, and skip the reverb.
- AgogoTwo bells a fourth apart, played as a phrase rather than a pulse, mixed as loud as the drums. Pan it slightly off centre and put the congas on the opposite side.
- Leave the holesWhen the arrangement feels thin, take something out rather than adding. These records work because you can hear each part start and stop.
- Record the roomUse whatever space you are in as the only reverb, with one microphone in the corner. A plate on these parts makes them sound like the records they were reacting against.
Reference points
ESG, Liquid Liquid, Was (Not Was), Kid Creole and the Coconuts, Dinosaur L, Konk, and the ZE and 99 Records catalogues. Named as reference points for the sound, not as endorsements.
The pattern is a starting point rather than a rule. If you want the theory underneath why any of it works, Battuto measures it.