Justin Velor – Super Disco Drums review

In any given week this writer perhaps listens to around thirty twelve inches across all the genres and whatever fits in-between. It’s still all too rare to sit through a record that immediately makes you crave to be transported to a warehouse space circa 2am of a weekend night, the floor heaving with several hundred bodies sweatily in sync with the beat that surrounds. This twelve inch release on the aptly titled Brutal Music is most definitely one of those records.

There’s a primal urgency to “Super Disco Drums”, the epic 13 minute excursion into dub disco which is all too absent from the digitally formed nu-disco norm. Steeped in same kind of hypnotic percussive grooves of 80s punk funk forebearers, “Super Disco Drums” feels like it could go on forever, greedily you wish it did, as any number of heavily delayed sound processes are squeezed out of “aged analogue equipment” – hell there’s even room for some decidedly odd bird like chirping…

That the track should come from the dusty fingers of Justin Velor aka Dom Thomas and Black Lodge, affiliated with Finders Keepers and Trilogy Tapes respectively, means it all makes sense, given their feverish musical knowledge. This crazily limited twelve (only 100 were apparently pressed) is worth it for the A Side alone, yet there is more sonic reward to be found elsewhere.

“Pride Part 2” for instance, see Velor go solo but retains the heavily dubbed feel, but in place of the tribal mindfuck is this rasping metallic groove, with clangs and twangs in all the right places. In what sounds like a zombified Arthur Russell taking up the production reigns, some decidedly subterranean, almost out of key orchestral touches occupy the nether regions in tandem with a a barely audible spectral backing. A brief segue sounding like a ghost stuck in the machine leads into the freakadelic head nod delight of final track “I Can’t Sing” with mad analogue sounds shooting in all directions over a rusted Bronx beat before everything implodes into scratched silence.

Tony Poland