Well, my good friend G was brilliant enough to discover the name of the tune I posted that video of last time. Far from being a new sound, it was in fact released in the year of my birth. When I found this out, I didn’t pick my jaw up off the floor for quite a long time. Virgo’s “My Space” was the B-side on the Free Yourself single, released in 1986 on the Trax label. I’ve since discovered it was part of the same era that brought us Phuture’s seminal “Acid Tracks” and Adonis’ classic “No Way Back”. “My Space” got played twice at that m_nus night, by both Magda and Hawtin, and both times I started dancing in ways I didn’t know I could.
It sounded so futuristic; I guess it’s both chastening and reassuring that it’s actually so old. Chastening because it shows how little I know about the history of the music I love, but reassuring because it means that any argument about new vs old is trying to draw distinctions that in my mind aren’t necessarily there. Whether you’re Magda using Serato to drop a 1986 trax record alongside the latest (futurest?) Hungarian import, or whether you’re Detroit legend Robert Hood and you don’t know that Magda is a girl but you think that (s)he is incredible anyway, the fact is that the impact when you play a track like “My Space” is, to me, as relevant now as it probably was the day I was (literally) born.
Virgo - “My Space” [Trax] (Buy the reissue)
This weekend we went to see Anja Schneider DJ at East Village near Old St. It was a pretty good venue and the sound was wonderful. I recognised a couple of tracks - the ominous title track from her Beyond The Valley album eluded identification on the night but I’ve since chased it up, and “Belize” was a shoo-in - but I wish I knew the names of a few others that she played, especially one with an endlessly ascendant synth note that took about 2 minutes to peak before the beat dropped back in. In all it was a great set, given that she only had 2 hours to play; we even missed the end because we didn’t realise she’d finish so soon so went for a badly-timed cigarette break. I greet Polder’s “Topdrop” with the broadest of grins every time I hear it now, although I did think she got lost in a few too many deephouse meanders towards the end of her set. Still, a very worthwhile night in a very pleasing venue. Here’s to more of the same.
And, lucky me living where I do, next week Âme are DJing just down the road at Café 1001 on Brick Lane. The week after, Dixon/Prosumer/Sebo K/Maurice Fulton/Geddes are playing in a Mulletover vs Resident Advisor Brazilian bonanza in some secret location out East somewhere. It promises to be a colourful, flamboyant, blissful night.
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