Taped US Vinyl & CDs

Review: Chicagoan crate digger, DJ and producer Mark Grusane has long been regarded as one of the best re-editors in the business, with a long list of labels queuing up to put out his tried and tested reworks. Here be unveils a new project, The Tape Edits, in which he rearranges and revitalised cuts the old fashioned way - IE via the use of reel-to-reel tape, a scalpel and some sticky tape. There's plenty to admire across the six tracks stretched across two slabs of wax, from the high-tempo jazz-fusion-goes-disco hedonism of 'I Can't Come Down' and the killer-grooves-and-analogue synths flex of 'The Fever', to the low-slung disco-funk heaviness of 'Stomp The Floor' and the spacey disco-funk brilliance of closing cut 'Giving Nothing'.

Review: Over the years, Chicago house DJ Mark Grusane has prospected for treasure with such success that he has more or less marked *himself* out as one such treasure. Such high praise, of which there is much online, offers a kind of eternal gilt return. This second edition in Grusane's Tape Edits series stocks a select six of his much-envied "disco tape to tape edits", made in Chicago between 1988-1999. Emphasising the fullest, most maximal quixotisms in disco, all the tracks here brim with seething compressed energy, with the limitation of tape transfer serving to squash and squeeze far more out of the disco genre than the simple, ostensibly humble mylar medium might suggest. Most arresting is 'Mapouka Dance (Non Stop)', an animalistic fire dance and lusty attention grabber, serving whipping snares and whooping crowd jeers; sexy spectatorship by the dance.