Disco 2009?

What sound dominated 2008? When you are looking at the industry from a long tail perspective, with all the various niche labels and artists beginning to flourish, it really is difficult to pin down what they year sounded like. The pop chart was its usual mess of cheap RnB and mildly entertaining electropop, with even some Nickleback thrown in to balance things out. Not forgetting the Brit school class of '08, of course.

I had been predicting the return of disco for quite some time. You could feel it bubbling - the word returning to the vernacular, a mid-tempo pace coming back to the dance floor. Hand claps and triangles were seeping into even the most stalwart of producers material. We'd already seen some mainstream applications - both Madonna and Goldfrapp had big success with Confessions and Supernature - though I felt both of these albums used disco in a kitsch retro form (incidentally in 2008, both artists turned their back on disco with albums that were commercially less successful).

Hands down the best "dance" album of the year goes to Crazy P's Stop Space Return - fantastic fresh disco and electronic pop. The underground retro italo movement also came to the front with Heartbreak's debut Lies - hot on the heels of Vogue's prediction that italo was back. I had thought that new albums from The Killers and Cut Copy might encorporate more of the disco sound - instead, they kept things cautious and stayed well within their established boundaries of 80s pop.

And DJs were allowing the sound to sit prominently within their sets. A visit to Glasgow during Sara Berg's UK tour allowed us to check out Optimo's set at Sub Club. The small basement was alive with shimmering nu disco and italo - truly the best set I heard this year. Metro Area - no stranger to the genre that they perpetuate in immitable style - delivered the best mix of the year with their contribution to the Fabric series. The London club scene was not so consistent - with large clubs closing down, and the kids still falling into k-holes across Shoreditch, harder darker electrohouse still dominated - though there were signs of a more melodic, discohouse trend developing (The Joiners Arms legendary Thursday night sets being a prime example!).

Will disco finally re-invent itself in 2009? For the sake of the future of clubbing - lets hope so.

Image from PTGreg on Flickr

"Revolutions EP" by Melnyk

Today is the official worldwide release date of the new single. Pleased to be able to finally release "Revolutions "to the world.

Having my first new material out in over a year is quite an interesting feeling. I've worked so hard for this album, just as I did for Silence - only this time I suppose we have so much more experience of the music industry and how all the pieces of the puzzle fit around a release. Still, I feel like we are moving yet again into new territory - the business has changed so much in the past 3 years, that anything could happen with this record. 

"Revolutions" was about the third track that I wrote when I started putting songs together for my second album.  I knew I wanted to do something with more of a traditional pop song form, which Silence had touched on but never fully explored. 

One night, shortly after I started working on the instrumental, I was out with Fonteyn, and he took me to a bizarre basement members club off Regent Street to see this new band he was in love with.  The group were Heartbreak, fronted by this charismatic moustachioed Argentinian. They delivered a dark set of original italo inspired electro, fitting for the odd surroundings. And his voice stood out to me to be something entirely special. I knew he would be the one to collaborate with on this new track.

Last summer Sebastian came to my studio to try out some vocals.  We actually started with "Want It Now" - which I invited him to write the lyrics for and used as a bit of a test to see how well we would work together.  He was brilliant - I knew straight away that he was the one for "Revolutions". 

I then went off traveling for a few weeks to India, and actually wrote the lyrics in the back of a car somewhere between Delhi and Agra. Its funny where inspiration takes you! The melody had been firmly planted in my head for weeks - I just didn't know what the song was really about. Perhaps it was all that rich colonial history ... or maybe Ghandi? 

On my return Sebastian came back to the studio and we finished the recording in the afternoon.

There are so many meanings to the song - I explored a bit of them in a previous post. Just as the word has many connotations, so does the track itself. But I guess I can leave it up to the listener to decipher for themselves.

"Revolutions EP" is out now via all the best download merchants.

Including, of course, iTunes.