Prime Numbers has surfaced from the wading pool of deep house labels at a remarkable rate. Considering the apparent nonchalance of Prime No. 1 David Wolstencroft (best known as Trus’me), the consistency and quality of PN’s catalog is almost surprising. Developing an identifiable sound around a close-knit and capable collection of producers in just a few years requires equal amounts of luck, astute determination, and obviously, trust. Both eerie and warm, indivisible and expansive, reflective and current, the Prime Numbers sound boogies down like tears in rain. Prime producers like Reggie Dokes (owner of Detroit’s Psychostasia Recordings), Linkwood (Nick Moore), and Fudge Fingas (Gavin Sutherland) share Wolstencroft’s ethos to the point of near interchangeability (as evinced by the mixed disc of last years PN comp), while maintaining fresh takes on the sound. But with only bits and pieces thus far (albeit bright and poignant ones), and with Trus’me’s second album In the Red yet to see the light of day, it’s still to be seen how this collective drive should play out in greater detail. With System, Moore has slow-brewed just such a model, while further rendering his thematic preoccupations and once again proving his consummate production style.
Author Archive: Andrew Clapper
Social Disco Club & Maia, The Way You Move
The name of Social Disco Club’s monthly party in Porto, Portugal is “Are You Re-Edit?” which up to now has been an apt description of Humberto Matias’s dance floor MO. On the SDC blog, Matias has been exploring the history and consequences of disco and posting choice and cheeky vinyl-rips and re-edits since 2007. His wholehearted enthusiasm (even for the English language) has made the SDC a popular watering hole on the disco blog circuit and eventually given him the opportunity to reach a vinyl audience last year with releases on Spanish label OCSID Music and Belgian label Mindless Boogie. While “The Way You Move” shows Matias trying his hand at original production with X-Wife band member and fellow Porto native Rui Maia, it clearly reflects a re-edit sensibility with some left of center vocal sampling and a restrained, indulging pace that maintains both tension and release.
Still Going, Spaghetti Circus/Untitled Love
On July 12, 1979, during the intermission of a doubleheader between the White Sox and the Detroit Tigers, rock radio DJ Steve Dahl hosted an event called Disco Demolition Derby at Chicago’s Comiskey Park. Amidst cries of “disco sucks!” a seething army of Middle America, fifty thousand strong, participated in the destruction of disco records, culminating in a near-riot and prompting the appearance of police on horseback. Though the myopic, racist, homophobic nature of such an event should be glaringly obvious, the likes of Dahl have had a lasting effect on popular conceptions of dance music, and particularly of disco. Since then, the efforts of those who produce and play disco are often branded with the faddish tag, “revival,” invoking the “day disco died” as an actual fact and a possible recurrence.