![]() Featured tracks included Johnny B Goode by Chuck Berry excerpts from Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier and an address from Kurt Waldheim, the former secretary-general of the United Nations, who, in the years following the Voyager launch, was unmasked as an former Nazi party member. Each was fitted with a specially commissioned gold-plated copper 12-inch record, etched with recordings from Earth, as well as universally comprehensible playback instructions for whichever alien crate-digger first chanced upon the probe. In 1977, at disco’s apex, Nasa launched its deep space probes, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. So perhaps Nasa should show a little love? Now, 40 years after the Disco Demolition Night sought to bring an end to the genre, disco’s cosmic vitality seems as undying as the Webb telescope’s starlight. ![]() Responding to the Webb pictures, Nasa’s media team, perhaps more alive to the place of candy-coloured space gas and nascent stars within our cultural universe, reminded us all that the shimmering wall of interstellar matter in the Carina nebula is known colloquially as the Cosmic Cliffs – a title that sounds like a 1980 Italo-disco deep-cut by Kano. These singles, prized by collectors, reached a new audience in the late 1990s and early 2000s thanks to reissue labels such as Belgium’s Radius Records, clubs like London’s Horse Meat Disco, and latter-day producers including Lindstrøm and Prins Thomas. This led to spacey, hi-tech records such as Capricorn by Capricorn or Feel the Drive by Doctor’s Cat finding favour in the Italian peninsula, in neighbouring Germany, and in the distant clubs of Chicago and Detroit, among nascent house and techno DJs. ![]() Local music producers began to reverse-engineer the sound so they could get their records played by the DJs. There, Baldelli combined conventional soul and funk records with British and European technopop, imported African and Brazilian sounds, as well as snatches of German “kosmische Musik” (known in English as krautrock), by bands such as Tangerine Dream and Ash Ra Tempel.īaldelli and fellow cosmic DJs such as Brescia, Italy’s Beppe Loda and Claudio “Moz-Art” Rispoli from the Baia degli Angeli beach club on the Adriatic Coast, were hugely popular. However, the person who truly launched disco into deep space has to be the Italian DJ Daniele Baldelli, who in 1979 was hired by a club called Cosmic, in Lazise, a resort town on the shore of Lake Garda in northern Italy. Larry Levan, resident DJ at the Paradise Garage, who kept disco alive in the 1980s, chose an equally extraterrestrial playlist with tunes like Galaxy by War, and Ednah Holt’s Serious, Sirius Space Party. ![]() His sets favoured spacey records such as Dexter Wansel’s Life On Mars and Lonnie Liston Smith’s Space Princess. David Mancuso, creator of the Loft club night in New York, is the DJ widely credited with laying the foundations of disco. Nevertheless, the cosmic entanglement of disco and space runs deeper than sleeve art. Composite: Columbia Records, Eastgate Music and Arts, EMI Watch Interstella 5555, Daft Punk’s anime rendering of their 2001 album, Discovery peep vintage disco videos such as Space by Magic Fly or stream archival Italian DJ mixes, and the visual link between the outer limits that the James Webb surveys and the inner space of the disco dancefloor become apparent.Ĭovers for albums by Lonnie Liston Smith, Tangerine Dream, and Daft Punk and Leiji Matsumoto. While the scientifically inclined might view these images as startlingly new renderings of light from aeons ago, those with a closer eye on the clubs and used record racks than on the night sky may look down the other end of the telescope and feel we’ve been here before. So is the entire universe just an aesthetically derivative rehash of 1970s disco futurism? The Los Angeles Times reporters Corinne Purtill and Sumeet Kulkarni were equally turned on to the cosmic connections, when they described the arcing twist in the telescope’s initial image as “galaxies swirling around a central point like the light thrown off from a disco ball”. The first image from Nasa’s James Webb space telescope of the Carina Nebula.
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