Review: The Revenge 'Reekin'structions'

THE REVENGE
Reekin'structions
[Z Records]

Disco edits are de rigeur in dance music at the minute, with a number of so-called producers' content to slap a sixteen-bar intro and outro onto a track and call it an edit. Bollocks to that. Reekin'structions, released on Joey Negro's Z Records, shows them how it's done. The compilation features ten tracks given a re-rub by Auld Reekie's own Graeme Clark aka The Revenge, who has developed quite the reputation for his lovingly assembled disco and funk re-edits, showcasing an innate ability to encapsulate the essence of an older - usually lesser-known - song and repackage it faithfully for new ears. Clark tweaks basslines, beefs up the intensity and builds his edits brilliantly; in the vein of Greg Wilson or the enigmatic Onur Engin (who is also doing fantastically considered re-edit work at the moment). Sure, it's not rocket science, but it's most certainly rocket fuel for a dance floor.

3 and 1/2 stars from 5

Radio Ponsonby Record Review: Walter Gibbons 'Jungle Music'

History is a funny thing.

Important periods of history are often condensed into bulletpoints or a handful of names designed to invoke an accepted wisdom.

A good example would be New York dance music legends like Frankie Knuckles, Larry Levan & David Mancuso, whose names invoke images of decadent mid-‘70s parties with heaving crowds of largely black gay men dancing with abandon to early disco & proto-house anthems.

However, the DJ those famous names above (& more) flocked to watch when they’d finished their own sets each night was a slightly built white guy by the name of Walter Gibbons.

One of the most important & yet unheralded DJs & remixers in dance music history, Gibbons was a pioneer of both reel to reel edits & the remix, while also inadvertantly acting as a tangible link between early hip hop & disco – he was extending the “break” of a record by playing two copies back-to-back seamlessly at a similar time Kool Herc began his famed block parties across town in the Bronx.

Jungle Music is an archive collection of essential & unreleased edits & remixes assembled from 1976-1986, a period which spans the release of the first ever 12” single – Gibbons’ remix of Double Exposure’s ‘10 Percent’ – to his “discovering” God & stepping back entirely from the groundbreaking, heavily percussive & often deeply trippy remixes which are found here.

These excitingly raw & uninhibited tracks - many of which push the 10min mark - may not be to everyone’s slick, modern dance music tastes, but as an historical document ‘Jungle Music’ is nothing short of essential.


Radio Ponsonby Record Review with 90 every Wenerei around 8.30am on Murry Sweetpants' Breakfast Show. Tune in! 107.7FM