Day 355: Black Devil Disco Club – Disco Club
It’s the best day of the week, it’s Disco Friday again. I’ve mined through enough classics now that I feel like I can branch out into the weirder stuff, so it’s time to explore a bit of some slightly sinister experimental disco music by Black Devil Disco Club.
Album cover courtesy of Out Records
Black Devil Disco Club was a solo project of a French musician called Bernard Fevre. Fevre had previously been a part of a group called Les Francs Garçons, but in the mid-70s, he went solo and released a disco album that didn’t make too much of a splash at the time and was mostly forgotten, until British electronic musician P.P. Roy got a copy at a car boot sale for 20 pence and shared it with his friends. One of those friends was Richard D. James, better known as Aphex Twin, who reissued it on his label in 2004, and in 2006, Fevre started playing music as Black Devil Disco Club again.
Long-time readers will know that anything that’s spooky-fun will always get me going, and this is definitely that – the general vibe of it is a bit menacing, but it’s mostly in a playful way. The vocals are distorted and fuzzy, and I honestly can’t think of a single sentence that I made out, they’re there but in a way that’s slightly clouded. The album was made by Fevre with just a drummer, tape loops and synths.
He says he was inspired by a wide variety of artists, from Vivaldi to Giorgio Moroder, but obviously also his dreams and visions:
I am often inspired by my dreams, their inconsistencies and the terrifying visions as much as the harmless ones. In the 1970s it was very important that the music we made resembled the future, that we, the young people we had in mind. Images of progress that we read in science fiction books and our own delusions that we’d create after a night drinking!
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the ‘70s must have been fun. When I think about what he said, what interests me is the whole concept of making music of the future, because it really feels like people aren’t trying to do that anymore, people are going backwards. Everything feels like a tribute to or a version of something that has already happened, but I guess in times like these it’s difficult to think of what the future would even sound like.
This was a fun one, it’s off-kilter and slightly unsettled disco that was definitely ahead of its time. I enjoyed listening to it, and while it’s definitely not something that’s going into regular rotation, I could see myself listening to it again. It’s right on the cusp of being a 7.5 but I’m giving it an 8/10.