Compost’s Elaste series reaches its third volume with Super Motion Disco, after Volume 1’s Slow Motion Disco and 2’s Cosmic Disco. Super Motion Disco is not some new fangled clunkily-named micro genre, we’re still looking at Cosmic/Italo disco, and as usual compiler and DJ Dompteur Mooner has unearthed a slew of weird synth-heavy dancefloor gems. While the tone is blindingly luminescent throughout, Mooner’s tastes are as wide as those of the pioneering Italian DJs Daniele Baldelli and Beppe Loda he so admires. “It’s no wonder that thousands of fans were waiting outside Discoteca Cosmic, Typhoon and other clubs to hear a surprising mix that could be anything from early German electronics to cumbia. DJs in Italy had the freedom to experiment with music… The crowd expected it and welcomed them to play crazier than any other DJ.”
Sounds like a golden time, and it’s easy to share Mooner’s enthusiasm from his selection here, which ranges from the frighteningly prescient space disco of Queen Samantha’s ‘Take A Chance’, which surges forth, Lindstrom-like, on a cosy bed of gasped ‘Ahhs’, to the pre-DFA laser-strafing prog-stomp of Moebius’s ‘Urth’. ‘Beats of Love’ by Nacht Und Nebel chugs patiently like Mark E; Tabu’s ‘Ellein’ skirts dangerously close to Scorpions power-ballad dirge but is redeemed by funky syn-drum rolls; The Deep Fix’s ‘Time Centre’ centres on barren Kraftwerk tones and sonar blips, like Sahko played by George Clinton; while the polysexual pogo of Pollyester’s ‘Beuys Boys’ oddly recalls Blur’s ‘Girls and Boys’. The final ‘dub mix’ of Toto’s ‘Africa’ by Key of Dreams may be divisive, but most who come this far ought to dig the poorly-processed voice and distorted keyboard riffs. I certainly did.
Joshua Meggitt
*
