Looking back: November
With November incoming, and a new year to soon follow it’s certainly a time to look forward to the future.
Although, this is something I vehemently hate to do. So, I thought: wouldn't it be fun instead to just simply look back and indulge in the past? With a genetic devotion to history, I like to think of myself as a fountain of fun (if useless) facts until put under pressure to produce. So, I have simply chosen to re-focus upon topics and moments me & Amber have already discussed on our show.
Lazy? Maybe, but rattled with an illness I hope to god is not covid, and the realisation on our ‘Everything Acid’ show that everything we’ve talked about before - artist, genre, synthesiser - keeps reappearing, I’m choosing to believe this all works in a circular way. To re-unpack, what I probably missed, and re-emphaise the significance of these moments, releases and people.
(No Pussyfooting)
I don’t think I can go more than two shows without mentioning Brian Eno.
A focal figure of Glam Rock and Ambient, two genres that, Eno aside, have nothing in common except that DAMBA focused on them. Considering I failed to do so recently on our acid show, let's first look back to November 1973, specifically Friday the 9th, which saw the release of (No Pussyfooting). A collaboration between Eno and Robert Fripp of King Crimson acclaim, it was the beginning of a long and prominent partnership for each career. Featuring the first use of ‘Frippertronics’, a tape looping technique that enabled a layering of guitar recordings and feedback.
His first project post Roxy Music, it brought exclusively drone music to a wider British audience, and became a landmark of the ambient genre Eno would later get to name.
This day would also see the release of Billy Joel's Piano Man, but the touches of that on experimental music are hard to see.
Patrick Cowley
(October 1950 - November 1982)
Perhaps taking a bit of a darker turn, but one intended for preservation of memory, November 1982 saw the death of Patrick Cowley from AIDS.
Another electronic producer who sits prominent in my subconscious, and is repeatedly mentioned on DAMBA, he was a pioneer of the San Francisco Hi-NRG scene. Founding Megatone Records (specialising in disco, Hi-NRG, and House) he was most routinely associated with disco icon Sylvester, producing his 1982 hit Do Ya Wanna Funk.
Explicitly queer, he produced energetic electro with a sarcastic, sexual, and space-age direction that kept disco dancing in the electronic age. Cowley’s sound defined the San-Francisco club scene, and provided a launching pad for later innovators. I only came across his work putting our Hi-NRG show together, yet since then he’s been an essential component of my daily soundtrack leaving an expansive back catalogue of synthesised gems that are continuing to be uncovered and released by the Dark Entries record label. Most recently, October’s Hardware, and 2024’s From Behind.
