The Dark Side

Here are a couple of cool cuts from 1984. 1984 was an interesting year for music. The boogie greatness of 1982 was fizzling out, electro was king, and house was just getting started. These tracks highlight where genres converged and coalesced into some strange hybrids.

This first track by Zero Hour shows a lot of electro influence and can easily pass as a theme song for the oft overlooked comedy masterpiece Fletch Lives. Seems like it could have been produced by Herbie Hancock or Jan Hammer with a little help from Egyptian Lover.

The next track by Leon Love is an odd bird produced by proto house legend Patrick Adams with Ron Mindseed. It sounds a bit like electro coming dangerously close to Hi-NRG territory. Almost too close; but us in the Bay Area have a very low threshold for it.

Zero Hour - The Dark Side (Dub)
Leon Love - Once Is Enough (Dub)

Firefly

We've covered Maurizio Sangineto's productions before on this site. Firefly was a dance music group composed of fellow Italians and released four LPs during their career. This track was a big tune at the Garage. The uplifting vocals get me every time. I also really like the brave use of some dynamic range in this 12" mix. It is rare to hear jams like this with such an impact when the beat comes in after the breakdown.

Firefly - Love (Is Gonna Be On Your Side)

Handsome Man

Carol Shinnette put records out on Oakland's 'Optune' label. Don't ever call the 415 number printed on the front of her 7" sleeves, as the gentleman on the other end of the line will threaten to kill you. This B.E have learned the hard way.

Although the record is claiming our hometown, it turns out it was actually produced in Lake Charles, Louisiana, where Carol still resides to this day.

Carol Shinnette - Handsome Man

She's A Party Girl

A younger and hipper DJ friend whose taste I admire bought a bunch of records and played me a couple from his haul that he thought I would like. One was a weird, left field, boogie proto rap type edit by a producer that he was into. I recognized it, and took smug, nauseating, sad dickhead like pleasure in telling him that I owned a copy of the original record that the edit was sourced from, but for the life of me couldn't remember what it was called, so I asked him to tell me the name and artist of the track but he couldn't, because whomever had done the edit had stuck his own name all over it and obscured that of the original artist. We then had an animated discussion as to the ethics of this sort of thing. I own plenty of bootlegs, and sometimes you simply can't find the original artists behind some of these more obscure records but none the less they deserve a repress for more people to play out and enjoy, there isn't much money in these short vinyl runs anyway, but can you really take the original artist's name off the track (I think it was obscured down to a two letter initial in this case) and stick yours on simply because you extended the drum intro? Perhaps the guy didn't want anyone to know the OG cut's name but why the secrecy? I see it a lot, it just seems like an exploitative way to prop up your own brand. I mean, you don't have to pay the guy who made the song that you looped up, but at least leave his name on there alongside yours.

Anyway, I went through my shelves and found it. Terrance Tee seems to have produced a couple of known early rap and boogie 45's that I have seen in auction lots etc, but this 12" doesn't seem to be listed anywhere. It came out on 'New York Town Records' and was written by Terrance Moore (no doubt Terrance Tee himself) and produced by T. Marcini. I cannot find anything on either of these people.

My copy is signed in scribbled pen "To Terri, From the M.C, Terrance Tee" . Terri, wherever you are, thank you for getting rid of this weird, weird record.

Terrance Tee - She's A Party Girl (Vocal)
Terrance Tee - She's A Party Girl (Instrumental)

I Wanna Feel Your Love

Here is a great disco boogie jam produced in part by drummer Howard King. He was a member of Mtume's band and also contributed to some great LPs from Gary Bartz, D-Train, Eddie Henderson, and Stephanie Mills. This tune has pretty amazing breakdown and is just great soulful dance music start to finish. Definitely a sleeper and a kinda tough pull from the RCA disco 12" catalog.

Candy Bowman - I Wanna Feel Your Love

Digital Dj'ing - Using a Laptop or PC as part of your Mobile Disco

Many Mobile Discos have made the change from a conventional CD or Vinyl based system to a software based one, usually running on either a full sized pc or a laptop. The fundamentals of both systems are largely the same, and so you shouldn't simply be taken in by reading other DJs horror stories about how their laptop overheated during the first dance at a Wedding or how their full sized PCs power supply exploded halfway through a gig. There are pros and cons of using both systems, but largely whether to use a full size pc or a laptop comes down to personal choice, practicality, budget and space, and you'll often find that DJ's criticising the opposite machine, have never actually used the system that they are criticising!. If possible visit a DJ who already uses a system to that which you intend to use yourself, nothing can sell an idea better than actually seeing it in use!, for the record, I have watched Mobile DJ's use both PC's and Laptops to DJ from, and neither, in my opinion, was more reliable or better than the other, so it should only be personal choice, rather than rumour or scaremongering which makes the decision on that score!.

Is running a Mobile Disco from a PC or Laptop reliable?

Anybody who has ever encountered the windows blue screen of death, or worn out the Ctrl+alt+del keys on their keyboard will possibly dread the thought of using such a system as a platform to their DJ'ing!. In essence, a decent dedicated pc or laptop with a clean install, good quality hard drive and a reasonable amount of memory will out preform most typical home pc set ups which may be running several applications at a time, be infiltrated with virus or spyware traces, and have a hard drive and registry full of corrupt enteries and partly uninstalled files.

Give Your New Year's Party Some Style With Disco Balls

They are round, shiny, and fun no matter what their size or color- they are disco balls. Any party becomes more fun when these are displayed. New Year's is the time for celebration, so consider adding these to the party decoration list. Whether they are stationary or rotating, the light bouncing off them adds pizzazz to the celebration.

New Year's parties are always better when they have a theme, so consider a disco-era theme and have everyone dress in period attire. Party goers will be decked out in their bell-bottoms, stacked heels, psychedelic shirts, and some very interesting hairstyles. Why waste money on a rental when you can spend the same amount, or less, to purchase a brand new ball.

A silver mirrored ball is the traditional style and sizes range from four to 16 inches. Add a few of these to the dance floor and get a turning motor so the ball will continuously spin. There is nothing cooler than a rotating disco ball paired with different color spot lights shining on the dance floor while everyone gets a groove on to the disco tunes.

Get Your Walls Spinning With a Disco Mirror Ball

More than just your walls will spin if you set up a disco mirror ball at your next gig.

A disco mirror ball is nothing more than a finely constructed ball of hundreds or even thousands of facets, most being of the same size, with each sporting a mirror finish.

It is normally located above the heads of the party goers present. It is in turn suspended from a device that causes it to turn steadily on a vertical axis and lit up by spotlights.

People present experience broken beams of colored light, coming from the spotlights, which are reflected off of it spinning around the room, causing an exciting visual effect.

Although many people today think of the disco mirror ball as a recent introduction to entertainment, it was in fact first used in 1919 by American jazz musicians to brighten up the atmosphere at their jazz concerts.

The Prep

Here is a late Christmas present. If my theory is true, and this is the only Minnesota disco rap ever recorded, then it also holds true that it is also the best one. To my ear its one of my top 5 disco raps of all time, the 1980 style party delivery with the 1985 era instrumentation make it unique. Sir Nature Alexander was a transplant to Minneapolis from Atlanta and became a well known fixture of the local music entertainment scene, most notably as the city's best breakdance instructor, going on to host his own show on local TV, and also working as a singer and producer on the Minneapolis funk circuit.

Sir Nature has a rare 1986 solo album with more of a contemporary for the time Minneapolis scene sound, but I don't own it sadly. He has been producing records constantly up and to this day, now more in the vein of Southern soul styled r'n'b, you can find Sir Nature Alexander current work here:

http://www.myspace.com/newjackblues

And you can find the first ever(?) rip of his electro masterpiece here:

Nature - The Prep

Candela

The Bell family from Youngston, Ohio produced three brothers who made immense contributions to the jazz/disco/funk scene in the 70s and 80s. Robert and Ronald Bell formed a group The Jazziacs that eventually became Kool & The Gang. Kevin Bell, also known by his Arabic name Amir Bayyan, formed Kool protege group The Kay Gees. Kevin was a prolific musician and producer, also playing in the group Forecast and producing jams for Armenta, LaToya Jackson, Tomorrow's Edition, and Jimmy Cliff. Here is one of his tight one-off tracks under the name Candela released in 1982 and mastered by Herb Powers Jr.

Candela - Love You Madly (extended version)

Mirage

So yeah this italo track from 1984 is probably one of the most lyrically confusing songs of all time. The vocalist implores you to "get down" all while scorning the concept of cheating and engaging in threesomes. Seems to be a bit counter intuitive to the whole 80's disco vibe in general, but that aside Get Down is a hot track.

Mirage - Get Down

P-5

Just as Patrick Adams late 70's disco sound became defined by his Arp 2600 noodlings, pretty much every funk track Leroy Burgess cut in the boogie era had a Prophet 5 solo on it. Sequential Circuits factory patch # 32 to be exact for all you synth nerds out there. And if he really wanted to switch it up maybe he would go for patch # 17 instead. So in effect thanks to Leroy and company the Prophet 5 became the quintessential funk synth machine of the early 80's.

This is the Fantastic Aleems high water mark and it most certainly delivers. I must say I was a little bit surprised when I realized today that after nearly 5 years of doing Beat Electric none of us had ever posted this track until now. Either we have failed you all or it's a sign that we are far from done mining this territory.

The Fantastic Aleems featuring Leroy Burgess - Get Down Friday Nite

The Fantastic Aleems featuring Leroy Burgess - Get Down Friday Nite (Instrumental)

Breakin' In Space

Could Radar Records do no wrong? Key-Matic's Breakin' In Space was by far the labels biggest 'hit', and the record holds a place in the pantheon of early electro master pieces. It has all the right ingredients, tastefully done vocoder (I'm by no means a vocoder collector/fan/nerd), non lame old school raps about space, dubbed out synths and cosmic overtones.

There are even a few young, future celebrities on this cut. The saxophone was done by Najee, who went on to rival Kenny G for a while as smooth jazz radio sax top dog, and we also have some scratches from Wizard K-Jee, a.k.a Keith Shocklee, future Bomb Squad member and the discoverer of Chuck D.

Here are all the cuts from the record.

Key-Matic – Breakin' In Space (Vocal)
Key-Matic – Breakin' In Space (Instrumental)
Key-Matic – Breakin' In Space (Lunar Beats i)
Key-Matic – Breakin' In Space (Lunar Beats ii)

Rysque' Records

Like many record collectors it has always been a dream of mine to press something on wax. I have always wanted to contribute to the world of the black crack by putting something in print for anyone to enjoy rather than just repping older hard to find records.
A couple years ago I became good friends with a local collector Tim who during an extended car ride to a record lead told me about his activity playing in several bands growing up in Oakland in the 1980s. After some pestering on my part Tim reluctantly dug up boxes of cassette recordings from this era. I think he was content leaving them as skeletons in the closet but I managed to convince him people still enjoy drum machine soul. Tim got on craigslist and tracked down the same model Tascam Porta-one four track machine we needed to play back the tapes.


Tim played regularly with a band known as Davinity during this time and recorded hours of material from bedroom demos to proper studio tracks. Recording quality is dodgy at times but fortunately they insisted on using only hi bias tapes and generally hit them with a good level. After sharing some of our finds with Sean from Sweater Funk and Andrew at PPU we decided to take the plunge and let some of this see the light of day 20+ years after it was recorded.


So far we have two 45s available featuring our favorite tracks from the Davinity cassette archives. A huge thank you goes to Andrew from PPU who was the inspiration for this project and provided a great deal of help in the process. Peoples Potential is also distributing the records worldwide.


We are very excited to start releasing music for y'all, look for more in the future including a debut from Beat Electric Records in 2012.

download lo-rez samples here
RYSQUE 001 Pierre - Cherri Snow b/w Veronica - So In Love
RYSQUE 003 Tim Tucker - C'Kret b/w Davinity - Fishnets

records available for purchase from EARCAVE (Washington DC), Rush Hour (Europe), and many other fine vendors. or you can email me directly at rysquerecs AT gmail.

Hypnotize with the Dance

We haven't put up any straight up hardcore disco in a long time so here you go. It is impossible to put these joints on and not want to invite all the foos in the neighborhood over for a dance party; unless you live where I live, then again, OK it's a bad idea altogether. Just convince BT to throw a matinee party at his house in LA and go hang out in his heated pool.

This Mandrill Jam reminds me or a mix between Tempest Trio's Do You Like The Way That It Feels and a song by Imagination. Sorry for the parts where it is clipping near the end, I am trying to dial in my new rig.

This early Tee Scott remix shows his knack for turning a straight forward disco hit into a dance floor classic with long drawn-out breaks with empty quiet backgrounds contrasting the disco anthem choruses.

Mandrill - Dance Of Love
First Choice - Love Thang (Tee Scott Remix)

94114

Beatelectic is starting to look a little dated, we gave it a revamp a couple of years back, but the fact is it's a blogspot page, and in this day and age thats the equivalent of having your website up on geocities, with animated gifs of grim reaper skulls puking fire and popup ad's for cheap hotel rooms. All the new blogs I go to with the decent new electronic music on look like they were made by a team of trendy engineers with degrees in graphic design, then I come back to beatelectric and we look like shit. In reality I suppose to have had a blog this long hosted by google with direct mp3 links to unlicensed music is somewhat of a miracle, most got taken down due to copyright infringement complaints long ago, but I think its really a testament to the unpopularity of the under the radar dusty commercial failures that we post. And with that in mind, I'm about to post some private press Hi Nrg...

My apartment is on the corner of Castro and Market St in San Francisco, which has been the heart of the gay community here for decades, and as such when I go digging around my local thrift stores and yard sales I come up with endless San Francisco scene high energy and uptempo, euro disco. Not my genres of choice or expertise, but each to their own. A block either side of where I live were the homes of Megatone records, Moby Dick records, Hot Tracks records, some other labels and plenty of record stores specializing in dance music popular in the gay clubs at the time. Now and again, when searching around the 'hood something locally made that's a little outside of the norm shows up.

Sonny Padilla Jr.'s self released 1985 single is marked as coming out on Uno Records, the address of which is a few doors down the street from me, an old apartment complex, and probably the address of Sonny's living room office. It turns out that this record is actually well known and quite sort after on the digging circuit, fetching a couple of hundred bucks in mint condition, due to it's heavy utilization of the vocoder on the A side's It's Your Body, and as a rarity it makes it on to a lot of vocoder nerd's wants list. I actually prefer the instrumental of the B side, 'Talk To Me!', which doesn't appear to be on the internet anywhere.

In the sleeve notes Sonny states that the record was made at The Automatt, a well known studio which is now a parking lot on Fulsom St, the photo in this post was taken from the main room's mixing console. Sonny lived in San Francisco and worked in the music industry throughout his life before passing away in 2007, an obituary to him can be found here:

http://articles.sfgate.com/2007-11-30/news/17270905_1_memorial-tribute-naras-tv

Sonny Padilla Jr. - It's Your Body!
Sonny Padilla Jr. - It's Your Body! (Instrumental)
Sonny Padilla Jr. - Talk To Me!
Sonny Padilla Jr. - Talk To Me! (Instrumental)

Adult R&B

Here are some slow jamz to cure your case of the mondays. This is the type of serious adults only R&B I like to vibe out to. "So Nice" is an album cut from Leroy Hutson's 1979 Unforgettable, unfortunately the rest of the record doesn't live up to the title. Don Blackman's "Heart's Desire" is a rare groove classic and needs no introduction. Bay Area funk artist Marvin Holmes shows us how it is done with a scorching late-period track from 1986. Don't be afraid of the lost years ('86-'89).

Leroy Hutson - So Nice

Don Blackman - Heart's Desire

Marvin Holmes - Feel So Good (instrumental)

Sypher

I've been neglecting my duties for some time now and for that I am remorseful. Fortunately, Joel Brüt has picked up the slack sharing his deep Kenny G cuts with the boogie world. But please don't blame him for posting those questionable white guy jazz noodlings, it's simply not his fault. He is a wine maker in Napa Valley, and that's how they roll up there in wine country.

This Sypher track has some 80's saxophone as well but it doesn't blow me out too hard. The lead synth hook is so fucking legit that this could be a Vertical Horizon track and it would still work for me. Fonda Rae's commanding lead vocals don't hurt either.

Sypher - It's Got To Be Right
Sypher - It's Got To Be Right (Dub Version)

Love Fever

I have never heard of a female audiophile. I have never met a girl that lusted after shiny knobs and had to have that preamp with a flowchart emblazoned onto the front to it. Knobs, switches, VU meters, equalizers, quadraphonic, and reverse stereo. I often wonder what a stereo would look that was designed by women. Probably much like my current stereo sadly, I am whipped!

Here is a slammin track that was released on Prelude records in 1981.

Gayle Adams - Love Fever (Instrumental)

Disco Halloween Costumes

Whether you lived through the groovy 70s or simply want a fun costume, there's something for you this Halloween. If you'd rather go back to the 50s or the start of the flower power movement, we've still got you covered. You'll definitely have a night to remember!

There are plenty of women's go go girl costumes. The Go Go Girl Adult Costume comes with a short sleeveless dress. The print: dozens of multicolored flowers. It includes a white hat and matching boot covers. Add peace sign earring for the finishing touch. A completely different Go Go Girl Adult Costume comes with a black and white dress, with a matching hat and belt. It is still on the short side, but a little bit looser. It looks great with the Mod Black and White Hoop Earrings and the Gogo Adult Boots. For something really different try the Twister Sexy Deluxe Adult Costume.

If you'd rather cover your legs and wear bellbottoms, we've got great options for you. The skin-tight Funky Dancin' Fox Adult costume comes with a purple, blue and gold metallic jumpsuit. It looks great with Gold Glitter Earrings and the Discorama Mama Blonde Wig Adult. The Flower Power Adult Hippie Costume is equally cute, but a bit less revealing. This pink costume comes with bellbottoms and a baby-doll shirt. It's sure to look great on anyone. The Feelin' Groovy Female Accessory Pack is a great add-on too. It comes with shades, pink peace sign earrings and a matching necklace.