What’s happening, loyal readers.

The last month got a little hectic, between the holidays, shows, balancing my time between fighting evil on Wall Street and teaching chess to orphans…not to mention the internet in my apartment cuts out for days at a time. Hence, infrequent posts trailing into an absence of posts.

But it’s a new decade for Heatwolves, and kicking it off right with a Disco Monday post. This time from Tensnake, a disco-ish* producer who’s blowing up this year.

*The word “disco” scares some people. “House music” used to scare me too, when I only knew it in its most commercial form. The term “discotheque” came up in my Chinese class a few weeks ago, as our textbook uses an outdated transliteration of that word to describe that place where we might get our freak on, The Club. An older American in my class who speaks Chinese comically with no tones (I can’t figure out if my teacher is overly polite or just lazy when it comes to correcting tones…either way this angers me) mentioned that disco was “a strange kind of music that people with tall hair and tight bell-bottomed pants dance to.” A lot of people might have this conception of disco, that it’s only some “Car Wash” jive that gets packaged in a Greatest Hits collection advertised on TV at 4am to people who are still up eating ice cream from the carton/taco bell. It’s not some throwback shit either. Disco never really died, it just changed clothes often.

Hip hop came from disco. House came from disco. Don’t be scared of disco. Disco might even get you laid, if you know how to dance. While it may work for bangers, jumping around and pumping fists like someone at a punk show will not work for disco.

It’s true that some disco sounds dated, especially the kick drums compared to contemporary digital ones. Some disco records even have real drums…sounds way different, sounds nice. This especially shows when old vinyl gets ripped to MP3, which really does degrade older recordings pretty severely. Some tracks should only be played on vinyl.

That’s what’s up. Learn to love proper disco, it will do you a world of good.

Unfortunately I only get to play this stuff at the the end of the night….usually. It’s not exactly “peak hour.”

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Tensnake - Holding Back My Love