Disco Inferno
DI Go Pop

Disco Inferno never knew true success. For the most part, their records and performances, in the eclectic English scene of the early '90s, passed under a general and indifferent silence except for rare but enthusiastic mentions in the music magazines of the time. The band was born in the late eighties in Essex under the guidance of guitarist and singer Ian Crause: in their first LP Open Doors, Closed Windows (1991) and the compilation In Debt (1992), they manifested as meticulous epigones of the post-punk sound akin to Joy Division and the Smiths. Brilliant, sure, but certainly not original.

It was during those years that Crause decided that Disco Inferno could be much more than just another local indie band. He had fallen in love with the shoegaze of the My Bloody Valentine, the dreamy electronics of the Orb, and the eclectic sampling of the Bomb Squad in the records of Public Enemy. Obtaining a sampler and a MIDI guitar to control it live, he began to experiment by integrating various types of samples into the band's sound: film clips, phrases, band recordings, ambient sounds. After a few EPs, Disco Inferno crystallized their new DNA, matured and refined, in their second LP, ironically titled D.I. Go Pop.

The 8 tracks on the album are hallucinatory and disorienting but at the same time violently vivid, like a lucid dream. In Sharky Waters exemplifies this, dragging the listener into a limbo between water surges, fluctuating bass lines, and furious outbursts verging on noise. The samples, as one might expect, are the album's strong point. An incessant kaleidoscope of samples unfolds, of various natures, manipulated and repeated to exhaustion to the point of losing their intrinsic meaning and becoming pure, liquid, and total sound. Thus, the sound of bells in New Clothes for the New World is played simultaneously at different pitches and speeds to the point of becoming unrecognizable, and a children's choir becomes an obsessive mantra in Starbound. Compared to the mechanical and industrial sequencers of bands like Skinny Puppy or the Young Gods (whom Crause admired) in D.I. Go Pop the samples often deliberately blur the boundary between melodic and rhythmic roles, enveloping the tracks from start to finish, which for almost the entire album abandon drums or drum machines altogether.

The influences the group grew up with are still always present, from the echoes of Peter Hook in the bass part of Next Year to the dream pop suggestions in the haunting melodies of Footprints In Snow. However, the writing of the pieces takes the form of a predominantly "pop" song structure, as the album title indeed declares: it is an alien, schizoid, and disoriented pop, overwhelmed by a sandstorm where every point of reference fades, leaving only a vague halo of what once was. Crause’s voice, reminiscent of the icy chants of the Slint, barely emerges from the sonic mass; in spite of this fact, the lyrics are another significant point of Disco Inferno's music. At times scornfully ironic, at other times laden with existential angst, they make pieces like the ballad Even The Sea Sides Against Us true punches in the stomach in their disorientation and disillusionment ("A future so close, I could sell my kids for it/But I'd rather be penniless, than buy any shares for it").

D.I. Go Pop is a masterpiece that in just over half an hour manages to evoke landscapes of painful and destabilizing beauty, without compromises. It is a post-rock album in the purest sense of the term, loaded with sounds never heard before and rarely repeated afterward. Unlike other works of its time neglected at the moment of release (such as Spiderland by the aforementioned Slint, which has long since rightfully acquired classic status), this album has remained sadly unknown and in recent years is slowly coming back to the public's attention, with bands like the Animal Collective and MGMT acknowledging its influence on their music. Demonstrating that while Disco Inferno didn't make a big impression at the time, this little gem refuses to remain unheard.

(A curiosity: Daniel Gish, the first keyboardist of Disco Inferno, left the group right after its formation to play with Bark Psychosis, a group that would equally write an important page in the post-rock saga, but in another direction.)