Track Listing

1. Launderette - Goldman, Vivien
2. Mind Your Own Business - Delta 5
3. My Spine Is The Bassline - Shriekback
4. Your Life - Konk
5. Crunch Cake - Isotope
6. Contort Yourself - White, James & The Blacks
7. Love Tempo - Quando Quango
8. Seoul Music - Yellow Magic Orchestra
9. Don't Lose Control - Material
10. Binary - Kazino
11. Los Ninos Del Parque - Liaisons Dangereuses
12. Sharevari - Number Of Names
13. Beat 'Em Right - Six Sed Red
14. Silent Street/Silent Dub - Maximum Joy

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #45148 in Music
• Released on: 2008-02-04
• Number of discs: 1

Customer Reviews

'Death Disco'
As it's title amply conveys, `DND' is a compilation of electro and semi-industrial dance music from it's golden era, 1974 - 1986. The biggest problem it faces (and fails to overcome) is it's inherent lack of warmth and richness. I suppose it would take on a different ambience if you were listening to it in a sweaty club, waiting for Kraftwerk to come on, but these cuts laid out corpse-like on the slab, don't much engage the listener searching for aesthetic charge or stimuli. In short, it's bland and repetitive. And that's the genre as a whole, not just this compilation.
It begins strongly with Vivien Goldman's floating wasp of a song `Launderette', but it's a false dawn. The rest of `DND' is predictable and repetitious, tinny drum machines click away, funky basses throb, but it all seems a performance of duty. There's no guile or flexibility, it's all anodyne and static.
Shriekback's `My Spine is the Bass Line' is a typical offender. Hiding under the `experimental' banner, (ie; melody-less) it sputters about in limbo, trying hard (too hard?) to be gauche and vital but succeeding only in diverting the progressively apathetic listener into the paths of the far more accommodating Chic and Donna Summer.
The rest of `DND' treads a monochord, kyphosis sing-song path. What vocals there are, are either typical Teutonic in robotic monotone, or charmless whispering in a desperate attempt to make it all sound sexy. A standard risible praxis. Functional. Automaton instead of autonomy. Riddled with cliché and wanton stubborness, it can't evolve into anything more than premeditated and straight-forward strangeness.
Each track goes on forever. There's a bewildering array of mixes and versions, which are supposedly activating and engaging the senses, but in reality are just piling on the agony.
It ends with two stormers by Six Said Red and Maximum Joy, but it's much too late in the day, the damage long being done.
Dance music without soul is an atrocious concept, and in a very real sense, a contradiction in terms. `The Hacienda Classics' is a much more satisfying collection, although not without flaws of it's own.
On this evidence, white boys (and girls) certainly can't play the funk, but they can clobber the attempt. Some of these squeaky synths sound like cheap keyboards you might give a child for Christmas, and the unsurprising percussion, something you'd hear in a working man's club.
Worst of all, it's all so cripplingly serious. Too harsh, too formulaic, and you could say without a hint of irony, too European.
`DND' shortcomings are painfully obvious, and that's Blitz-Club, electro-dance music's problem to a tee.

Seminal dance tracks
Strut records has done the dirty work here of sifting through music long past its hey-day in an effort to bring it back to life. They've picked out fourteen tracks ranging from reactionary 70's post punk to left field disco, dusted them off, and packaged them here for your trip into a decade that shouldn't be forgotten. The original two compilations released at the turn of the decade as a new wave of bands like The Rapture and LCD Soundsystem drew on the music's influence, DISCO NOT DISCO has since been adopted in its own right as a term to describe a whole genre. The compilation is more timely than ever in 2008 as a reference point for a burgeoning mainstream scene.

The new edition moves from New York classics by Konk and Bill Laswell's Material to early Detroit machine music, Belgian New Beat and a healthy dose of UK originals from Shriekback, Quando Quango and more on seminal labels like Y and Factory. Watch out too for rare gems from unexpected sources including Gina X and `70s prog collective Isotope.