Various - Disco Madness album flac

If you casually glance at the tracklist you may think that it's just another Salsoul compilation. But these are actually Walter Gibbons remixes and he is a genius of a remixer and also the first one. Ok, so I think I've only actually heard "It's Good For The Soul" so let me just talk about that.For me "It's Good For The Soul" is the first house track. Sure, there's not a drum machine in sight and the Warehouse was just getting started, but it's all about the structure. Actually, even in sound it's a lot closer to what we think of as house music now than anything that came out in the 80's.So you could listen to the original version for reference, standard Salsoul Orchestra stuff, but it's not even necessary to see how bonkers this track is. First of all it's sooo stripped down. What does "I Love You" have to do with anything? Then it hits you how the parts don't really make sense in a standard musical way, there's no resolution. The drums alternate with a bit of flute and horns - very little of the lush strings and keys that kind of bring it all together in the original arrangement. So it's very much like what the hip hop dj's were starting to do with extending breaks. But there are a series of explosions, peaks of intensity, where it switches from one drum section to another in a very modern way. The little voice snippets punctuate the track like samples would be doing a decade later but also comment on it ("sing it girls") in a way deejays do in reggae. I think reggae also influenced Gibbons here through dub versions showing how by stripping things down the track could have a bigger impact. When the chords come in near the end it feels like you are levitating. Just like dub, this was a pure studio creation, no orchestra would or even could play it this way. There's an uncanny charge records carry when they truly capture something new being born. I get that feeling from early 90's jungle records, something that never quite makes sense or loses its mystery no matter how many times you hear it. This is one of those.

I was just reading about this in a dissertation, and it seems like this guy (Tim Lawrence) agrees with you (except for claiming this First Choice edit was the first official ‘house’ track):“Disco Madness helped forge a set of sonic principles that would run through the future of post-disco dance music. Aside from the Disco Dub Band's 1976 cover of "For the Love of Money" and Gibbons's mix of "Doin' the Best That I Can", the release was the closest disco had come to establishing an aesthetic alliance with dub, and that connection would be consolidated with the release of tracks such as "Love Money" by the Funk Masters (Siamese Records, 1981), the Peech Boys "Don't Make Me Wait" (West End, 1982), and François Kevorkian's twelve-inch remixes of "Keep On" by D Train (Prelude, 1982) and "Go Bang #5" by Dinosaur L (Sleeping Bag, 1982) in the early 1980s. The album also contributed to the emergence of house when Frankie Knuckles, who was spinning at the Warehouse in Chicago, turned the "Let No Man" remix into one of his signature records. A year or so later, Warehouse dancers started to describe the music they were hearing as "house music", and cited "Let No Man" as the record that was most typical of the sound. Although the Gibbons remix was less electronic than the dance tracks that would be laid down by the likes of Adonis, Chip E, Larry Heard, Marshall Jefferson, Frankie Knuckles, Jamie Principle and Jessie Saunders during 1984 and 1985, its stripped-down aesthetic, three-dimensional use of space and quotation-oriented schizophrenia place Gibbons as a visionary antecedent to the formal sound of house.”For anyone interested, I highly recommend reading the entire paper to get an idea/further appreciation for Walter Gibbons and this release: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/519f4158e4b046d94a96e72e/t/5231e671e4b055d877fbfee7/1379001969530/Walter-Gibbons-DISCO+MADNESS+.pdf