An undiscussed category of orphan works: obscure dance tracks on major labels

Major labels are sitting on so many dubs, instrumentals, edits and remixes from the '80s and '90s, yet you only ever see the same extended vocal mixes on every dance music compilation; you never see the other tracks from the original singles, none of the tracks sought-after by DJs and collectors.

Well, there's a reason for that. Songwriter, producer and DJ Piet Blank explained to a fan in mid-2016 that for the Blank & Jones Present So80s compilations, he and his partner have been having a lot of trouble licensing the specific mixes they want because the niche market for those obscure tracks would not offset the cost of locating the associated contracts and inputting the relevant info into a database.



The companies sometimes also have trouble locating master tapes or determining the current publishers for the underlying song.

In other words, the major record companies, the ones who are swimming in money, didn't bother to keep their house in order, so it is actually cheaper for them now to deny licenses for anything that's not readily available and accounted for in their system. Licensing rare, niche-market songs to people like Blank & Jones results in a loss (or just not a sizable enough profit) for the copyright owners, so they won't let anyone have them.

What pushes this over the line of reason is that it is also not profitable for the companies to do their own reissues of this material, so they just keep the music locked up forever.

The industry has thus created a new class of orphan works—orphaned not necessarily because all the copyright owners can't be found, but primarily virtue of the copyright owners' self-created mess that results in only the most profitable works being worth licensing. It's madness. How does this benefit anyone?

And still, these companies complain that they are losing money to music bloggers and file-sharers who, without permission, release these rare tracks. How is it ever costing them money? By their own admission, thanks to their greed and copyright law, there is no market for the bloggers to encroach upon. It makes zero sense.

PSB / Underworld

In the late ’90s through the late ’00s, it was all the rage among bedroom producers to make dance “remixes” by slapping a sampled percussion track over looping samples of ’80s hits. These were usually done without permission and were released on white-label vinyl in small quantities.
Here’s one of the more well-done examples:

• West End G’rls 2002 ( pw: 1986PetShop2002 )

I also really like this 2004 white-label techno remix of the song from the baby-on-the-ceiling scene in Trainspotting:

• Dark & Long

(W.E.G. link updated 2013-11-15)

Death of a Disco Dancer

An old acquaintance of mine made this little edit (well, remix) of “Death of a Disco Dancer” by The Smiths:

• FBK - Death of a Disco Dancer

The original [YouTube link] is a great song, but not quite as danceable.

Two from the Material Girl

Time for some material by the Material Girl. (Surely she must get tired of being called that?)

First up is the wonderful re-edit of “Burnin’ Up”, a lesser hit from 1983. This lightly updated instrumental dub was crafted in 2009 by Rotciv, who is to be featured in a future post here. I can’t get enough of this track.

• Rotciv - Burnin'

Next is a 2010 edit of the atrocious Shep Pettibone Re-Remix of “Express Yourself”. The original re-remix appeared on the “Justify My Love” CD single in 1990. The creator of this edit would like to remain anonymous.

In the original 9-minute remix, Pettibone had some good ideas which built on what he did with the Stop & Go Dubs remix the year before. However, repeatedly dropping out the beat and soloing the backup or lead vocals, obliterating the necessary harmonies of both put together, just did not work out so well; the mix just doesn't work for dancing or listening.

A much shorter, sweeter dub is created by cutting out most of these gratuitous vocal segments. No re-arrangement was done; the removed parts are simply skipped over, and one of the seams was lightly mixed instead of using a straight cut.

• Express Yourself 1990 (De-Stupidified Edit)

The end result, while far more listenable than the original, isn’t the least bit fashionable — unlike the Rotciv edit, it's no diamond in the rough for your deep house/nu-disco/boogie set — but if you’re a fan of the song in general, it’ll make a nice addition to your personal shuffle-play rotation.

Bagarre - No Toys

Italian alterna-disco-pop group Bagarre are mainly known for their semi-hit “Lemonsweet”, an upbeat ode to LSD. As much as I love “Lemonsweet”, though, my love for the infectiously melodic “No Toys” surpasses it by an order of magnitude. “No Toys” reflects a creative, whimsical side of proto-Italo Disco, and lyrically it's dominated by a theme that crops up in many-an early/mid-’80s tune: imagining what glamour & sophistication must be associated with personal wealth that is just out of reach. The song has a brilliantly off-kilter chant for its chorus, and much like all the great Italo tunes, something’s just not quite right about it; certain English words are occasionally mispronounced or incorrectly substituted by the non-native speakers, vocal delivery is heavily accented and in unnatural rhythms, and the arrangement is simultaneously happy-go-lucky yet slightly dreamy and moody.

• Bagarre - No Toys
• Bagarre - Lemonsweet (search @ YouTube)

Google turned up no lyrics, so here’s my stab at them:

Ain’t got no toys The things that do for girls and boys A Cadillac smiles That I can drive for miles and miles One, two, ain’t got no toys The things that do for girls and boys Three, four, a Cadillac smiles That I can drive for miles and miles Bricks on bricks So I can make a house that slicks* Mmm, money So everybody will call me honey Five, six, bricks on bricks So I can make a house that sticks Seven, eight, money So everybody will call me honey Ain’t got no toys An orange Porsche and pink Rolls Royce Flowers in spring Diamond bracelets and golden rings One, two, ain’t got no toys An orange Porsche, pink Rolls Royce Three, four, flowers in spring Diamond bracelets, golden rings (repeat all of the above again)

Ain’t got no toys An orange Porsche and pink Rolls Royce Flowers in spring Diamond bracelets and golden rings One, two, ain’t got no toys An orange Porsche, pink Rolls Royce Three, four, flowers in spring Diamond bracelets, golden rings Dine at The Ritz Long fur coats and swocker on mitts** Ginny fizz And anything that will make me whiz Five, six, dine at the ritz Long fur coats and swocker on mitts** Seven, eight, ginny fizz And anything that will make me whiz Ain’t got no toys The things that do for girls and boys A Cadillac smiles That I can drive for miles and miles One, two, ain’t got no toys The things that do for girls and boys Three, four, a Cadillac smiles That I can drive for miles and miles Five, six, bricks on bricks So I can make a house that sticks Seven, eight, money So everybody will call me …honey

*In the 2nd verse it’s definitely not “house that sticks,” but in the chanted chorus, it definitely is. I'm pretty sure she’s saying "slicks".

**In the last original verse, “swocker on” is my phonetic approximation of what they’re saying. It’s definitely not “sparkling.” Maybe some brand of designer gloves?

Progressive House: born in 1988?

One of the things I’ve been doing over the last couple years has been painstakingly refining how I organize my digital music collection, which at this point is over 14,000 37,000 hand-selected tracks I like. It has no blind rips of full releases—otherwise it’d be 5 times as big, with lots of duplicates. So this means getting things filed away into a smarter system than just alphabetically.

Right now what I have is three main categories: DJ sets, Artists, and Genres. The first, DJ sets, is self-explanatory, and is still kind of a shambles. The second, Artists, is for artists that I have a lot of releases by, and who with only a few exceptions tend to cross genre boundaries (Orbital being a prime example). The third, Genres, is where the majority of the music lives.

The more music I sort into genres, the better picture I get of the history and nature of each one. For example, what used to be simply an Acid House folder evolved into three subfolders to partition the songs by decade—1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. Then the 1980s folder became more specifically 1986–1990 because some of the made-in-1990 tracks I had filed under 1990s were more closely tied, musically, to the original movement. Unlike in other genres, I haven’t split this period any further by years because acid house didn’t evolve very quickly; that is, 1986 acid house really doesn’t sound different enough from 1989 acid house to make it worth separating. Nevertheless, it became apparent that the decade-ish division wasn’t good enough, either, because there’s a distinct but difficult-to-describe difference in the acid house sounds created by geographically isolated producers. So the 1986–1990 folder now has subfolders: one for tracks originating in the genre’s birthplace of Chicago, one for New York, and one for the UK & Europe. If I queue up one of these folders and "drop the needle" on a selection of tracks within them, it’s astonishing how these seemingly pedantic divisions really make sense.

Also fascinating is that as I’m exposed to more music, I’m finding that some genres have histories going back earlier than I ever realized. Progressive house is a good example. There’s no good definition of this genre on the web, but generally speaking it’s house music that incorporates elements of trance and/or dub and/or breakbeat, and it has a plodding, smoothed out, not-so-bumpin’ sound (although there are exceptions). People usually know it when they hear it, but it’s hard to say what makes it “progressive”. Perhaps it’s defined more by what it’s not (it’s not regular booty-shakin’ house music) than by what it actually is.

Most folks who know about progressive house are aware it was associated with, if not partly defined by, the music on William Orbit’s Guerilla label during its heyday in the UK in 1991–1993; they know that “progressive trance” and “progressive breaks” are roughly the same style of music but with bass & percussion resembling trance or breaks moreso than house; and they know that by the late 1990s the word “progressive” was being used by itself as a catch-all for these plus music that wasn’t any more trancey than it was breaky or housey.

As with most genres, these names came into existence after a fair number of examples had already been produced, so it’s not surprising that the 1990 subfolder of my progressive trance/house/breaks meta-folder has been filling up with examples of music that was all just filed under ’house’ at the time it came out. What is surprising, though, is that not only is there now a 1989 subfolder that’s just as full as the 1990 one, but I’ve also had to start a 1988 subfolder. Progressive house in 1988? Heresy! How could it be true? Well, so far, the folder has one track in it: UK producer Richie Rich’s B-side “Salsa House”, modest remixes of which comprised a hit single in the following year. Listening to it, there’s no doubt in my mind: it does not belong anywhere else but in the progressive house folder. Now I’m wondering if this folder will fill up, too, and whether a 1987 folder is on the horizon.

Richie Rich - Salsa House

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Free ambient/downtempo music from Ishq / Ishvara / Indigo Egg

Despite my rant the other day, sometimes creators & rights holders need no persuasion, because they're already on board. Cornwall's psychedelic ambient/downtempo prodigies Matt Hillier & Jacqueline Kersley, for example, are proponents of digital sharing, and Matt was kind enough to give his permission for my favorite selections from their repertoire to be made available here.

1. Ishq - "Sky Blue (Live)"
   This track was on the Ishq website for a while in the mid-2000s. It's very similar to the studio version which appears on the 2002 Orchid album, but I just prefer this one a little better because of the way it builds in the beginning. This song is rather unusual for Ishq, as it uses a straightforward Balearic-style breakbeat sample and prominent bass riff throughout. Between the bass and synths, there's an actual melody. I think of this as "their disco record." Maybe not their deepest, but it's still one of my favorites.
2. Ishvara - "Nomad (Arabiq Mix)"
   This, too, was on the Ishq website. It's a nice, long building track with churning percussion throughout. It never got a full release, but an edited version, "Nomad (Arabian Remix)" was released on the Vampire Sunrise compilation in 2009. The edited version doesn't have the long ambient intro and outro, but is otherwise the same as this one.
3. Elemental Journey - "Air"
   This is Hillier in collaboration with Matt Coldrick. The 2005 album it comes from is rather trancey in a way that's not my cup of tea, but this beatless track is much different from the others and is more in line with Ishq's catalog.
4. Indigo Egg - "Clouds of Indigo" / "Shamballa" / "Smiling Buddha"
   All three of these tracks were enhanced, remastered, and released on the official 2008 release of Ixland. What I'm giving you here are pre-release versions from around 1998. Another mix of "Clouds of Indigo" first officially appeared on a compilation in 2000. Other mixes of "Smiling Buddha" appared as Ishq - "Happiness" on a compilation in 2004, and also on the Ishq website in 2005. "Shamballa" was retitled to the pair of songs "Clearlight" and "Home" on the 2008 release of Ixland.
5. Ishq - "Opal (Opaque Mix)"
   This is a c. 2000 pre-release mix, slightly different than the one which later appeared on Orchid.

And here are some links for further research:

• Discographies: Ishq / Indigo Egg / Ishvara / Matt Hillier
• Ishq's music blog
• Ishq's website
• Hi-res cover art for Indigo Egg - Ixland (2008 release): outside cover / inside cover