“The original vision for Discology was about good dance music from any era meaning disco but also funk, soul, old school hip hop, 80s dance, acid house, boogie, vintage electro, classic Detroit. The name Discology has actually more to do with ‘disc’ than ‘disco’.”
Though London and increasingly Paris have gone ‘nouveau disco’ crazy in the last 12 months, Sao Paulo club night Discology first began championing the trend 5 years earlier in underground clubs and minimally converted strip clubs around the city. The brainchild of top local journalists Claudia (Clau) Assef and Camilo Rocha (also one of Brazil’s best known DJs) the club nowadays takes place once a month at Vegas, one of the wildest and best clubs in Sao Paulo nightlife.
“The inspiration came from Clau and I looking at our massive record collections and thinking it was a real waste that they should stay home,” says Camilo, “At the time, 2003, local clubland was still dominated by linear DJ sets, so there was something radical about the notion of playing all these styles together, from many different eras.”
Launching with a main room music policy of no music less than 10 years old, the club rapidly attracted local superstar DJ types such as Marky and Renato Cohen, keen for the chance to play radically different sets than the styles they’re known for, while more recently the likes of new disco stars Greg Wilson, Daniel Wang and Mike Simonetti have all headlined. With the club attracting a fantastically mixed crowd of uber-flamboyant, highly sexed gays, freaks and music loving regulars, Discology has already had an impact far beyond Sao Paulo and indeed Brazil, with diversity its key, in both crowd and music.
Camilo, one of Brazil’s most experienced and respected music journalists, has more than a few theories why disco has come back.
“In the 2000s, electronic music got very, well, electronic,” he points out.
“That whole electro-minimal-tech axis pushed this to the limit, to exhaustion so any people started to crave more organic sounds, more musical stuff,” he suggests. “A lot of people got seriously bored listening to DJs playing linear sets of instrumental tracks, year after year, and all that genre- and sub-genre, fascism that developed. Dance music, and techno, stopped being fun and instead became very rigid and that alienated a lot of people,” he says.
More positively, he’s enthusiastic about the myriad changes brought by the web, particularly the globalization of ‘cool’’.
“The internet is a big influence on dance music now because people are no longer following ‘movements’ in the way they did in the 90s, when people aligned themselves to ‘techno’ or ‘house’ or ‘drum & bass’ with those scenes’ particular rules,” he continues.
“Today they can select from a vast diversity of sounds and ideas and I think this mentality encourages people to seek good music from different eras, not only the ‘latest tunes’. We also have four decades of fantastic dance music behind us; it's a waste not to delve into that.”
Camilo himself followed techno, initially on London’s squat party underground of the Liberators and D.A.V.E. The Drummer, then later on becoming a big name Brazilian techno DJ himself.
“I had a huge techno period as of the mid-1990s and I still follow, like and play a lot of techno, although for me most of it has reached a very repetitive point, devoid of interesting ideas or originality. You only need to listen to the Beatport techno/tech-house top 100 to realize that,” he says.
IHOUSEU (Jonty Skrufff): Discology’s just turned six, how much did Brazil have a massive disco scene first time round, in the late 70s Saturday Night Fever era?
Camilo Rocha: “It was truly massive back then, disco dominated Brazil’s airwaves, nightlife and culture. There was even a very popular soap opera called Dancin' Days in 1978, based around the disco lifestyle and that helped to make it even bigger. Rio and São Paulo had state-of-the-art discotheques, and hundred of albums and disoc 12” records came out, way more than were ever released on the modern dance music scene. Mainstream Brazilian artists such as Gilberto Gil, Tim Maia and Jorge Benjor also released discofied tunes, and some very fine DJs emerged from that era many of whom are still around today.”
IHOUSEU: You were a techno man for years: how much hostility did you get from your techno associates/ fans when you started playing disco?
“I didn't get hostility, probably more puzzled faces on people who went to see me expecting Mark Broom and got Salsoul Orchestra instead. However, this was no abrupt transition, this has been happening over six years, and I still get booked regularly today to play techno. So it’s more like a parallel thing than a rupture.”
IHOUSEU: What do you make of London’s ‘nouveau disco’ scene?
“It's a scene I've read and heard a lot about but I’ve never been to any clubs there. Last time I went to London was in 2005 and I believe this scene wasn't as consolidated then as it is now. The whole subsequent disco edit explosion has influenced what we play in Discology for sure. We used to play almost all original tracks and now we include a lot of re-edits in our sets.”
IHOUSEU: How much do you consider ‘nouveau disco’ to be a genuinely new trend? How much is there a new wave of teenage disco fans out there??
“I think it is a trend but I wouldn't say it is a very popular one . . . yet. In Sao Paulo, new disco or whatever you want to call it is still restricted to certain nights and some DJs. Yet I think there is a lot of crossover potential here definitely. As for the age groups, it certainly attracts an older crowd predominantly. But then again, disco is open and inclusive by nature, so you find all sorts of people at the parties.”
IHOUSEU: How much do you fear the inevitable disco sucks backlash?
“I don't think there is any climate or context for anything remotely similar. A current equivalent of disco sucks would have to have been directed at dance music in general and if that was going to happen it would have been at the end of the 1990s, at the height of the superstar DJ era. It didn't happen. Then this decade kicked in, with a spirit of mixing and mashing up load of different reference points and knocking down rules and boundaries. The ex-drummer from Sepultura is a DJ, indie bands sign remixes and DJ at parties, that kind of sums up today’s spirit.”
IHOUSEU: There was a dreadful homophobic attack by skinheads on Rua Augusta on a guy who’d left a bar next door to Vegas, last month, What’s your take on that? Is it a one off?
“That was truly horrific and another sad example of how violent the city can be. There have been quite a few homophobic attacks and that is just the crude and raw end of intolerance and hatred, which also includes the preaching of evangelical priests, backward politicians and conservative publicity-seekers such as the woman behind the neighboorhood association that wants to close A Loca. That is why an event like the Gay Parade is so important.”
IHOUSEU: Is Augusta getting more dangerous?
“Augusta is the nightlife center in the capital now, so it tends to attract all sorts of people, including the worst kind. Hopefully the authorities and the police will react but they are famously slow, sometimes even seeming as if they don't really care. I've never felt unsafe myself as I usually drive to Vegas and park close and tend not to wander around the street too much. Many people do though, and I reckon on the whole the proportion of trouble is relatively low.”
http://tinyurl.com/dmgrpk (Download Camilo’s latest Tech-o-disco mix here)
http://www.myspace.com/camilorocha
http://rraurl.uol.com.br/blogs/bateestaca (Click Camilo’s blog here)
