Escort

Last week my friend Sasha Frere-Jones wrote about “the delicate art of revivals”: how deliberately vintage-sounding acts like Brooklyn funk&b group Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings or Swedish psych-pop band Dungen hold up against popular expectations that “new music” sound like “new music.” “How much of the past does one need to draw on before shifting categories from new to retro?” he wrote.

Right on cue, a Brooklyn-based disco-boogie revival outfit I like called Escort announced the imminent release of “Cocaine Blues,” their first twelve-inch in three years. (You can download the radio edit for free at their website.) Everything this band’s put out so far has the feel of an undiscovered classic, a song the disco compilations somehow forgot about. I remember hearing “Starlight,” their first single from 2006, and probably overdoing my show of disbelief when Jason Drummond, a/k/a DJ Spun, told me it wasn’t some one-off Montreal disco act from 1978. With the moody “Cocaine Blues” it’s no different; it might as well be a deep cut from some Chic LP I’ve never heard.

Dan Balis and Eugene Cho, the architects of Escort’s meticulous throwback sound and the band’s principal songwriters, were kind enough to talk about Frere-Jones’s piece and walk me through the kinds of decisions they make when putting together their records.

Riff City: A lot of your records, “Cocaine Blues” included, borrow very specific rhythms and melodies from very specific early disco tracks. How do you decide when a move or sound is ripe for borrowing, versus a move/sound that is overexposed and would potentially distract people that you’re taking it? What is your personal rulebook for “ripping something off”?

Eugene Cho: Sometimes the disco influence is very organic. We start playing our instruments and there’s a wealth of musical vocabulary that becomes second nature to you from listening to and playing dance music over the years. On the other side is that some grooves and musical ideas are so good that they’re screaming out to be explored and refined further. For “Cocaine Blues,” we found that some of the lyrics in previous incarnations of the song were taken from nineteenth century folk rhymes and we found other verses from those old rhymes and added them as well.

Dan Balis: “Cocaine Blues” is a loose interpretation of a Jamaican version of a turn-of-the-century blues song; a version, which in turn, relies on the groove from an American disco hit that was popular among Jamaican soundsystem DJs. We weren’t really preoccupied with distance, but rather with coming up with a unique and distinctive version of something we already thought was great.

EC: When we decided to do a version of “Cocaine Blues,” it was first because we loved the song and also that we knew we could do something with it that would resonate with our fans more than any other version before it. Making the groove harder, adding more hooks, fleshing out the production with horns and strings, and putting an aggressive vocal that gives the song immediacy. It relates to a Jamaican tradition of how everything good can and will be borrowed, explored and kept alive. Nothing is sacred, but you have to be conscious of what has happened before.

In our writing process, usually the vocal is king and we search within ourselves and from the past to find a groove that helps tell the story in the best way. When we’re looking back in time for inspiration we have a filter of what still moves us now, which is influenced by so many things, but really its rooted in DJing. What still moves the crowd, what isn’t played out, what seems interesting at the time.

What are the sounds & moves of disco/boogie you think still *work* in 2010? What are the disco sounds/moves that you’re happy to leave behind?

EC: Definitely no polyester or lamé.

DB: Bobby Vitteretti, a legendary DJ from San Francisco’s Trocadero Transfer came to our last show. So naturally, we’re both thrilled: here’s this sweet guy from disco’s halcyon days and he loves the show. But after the show, he asked us both the same question: why don’t you have more ”bombs” in your set? Blank stares. He explained what he meant to Eugene — the high-pitched “boooom” synthetic tom drum sound that most people know from “Ring My Bell.” And while we get where he’s coming from, it’s the sort of thing you have to be careful about. Certain timbres and musical devices — and it’s hard to put your finger on why — don’t date well.

There are plenty of things we’re perfectly happy to leave behind: dance tracks about dancing sometimes seem a bit redundant, or songs about music. It’s probably why we love August Darnell so much. Here’s someone writing great melodies with these brutally comic lyrics, but it’s not at the expense of the dancefloor.

But I do think the sort of “revivalist” tag gets thrown around a bit too promiscuously with bands like ours. It’s largely because things like funk and disco “died” for a lot of people, and represent a particular point in time. But there’s something different about rock: It never had its Comiskey Park moment. Every year, lots of records come out that explicitly sound like the Beatles, or the Velvet Underground. And there’s nothing wrong with that. I guess another way to think of the question is: Does pop or underground music still require the shock of the new for its punch?

RC: What is your studio setup? How does it differ from late ’70s-early ’80s studios? Were there pieces of recording equipment that you knew you absolutely had to have, in order to achieve certain sounds? What is your digital-analog breakdown? What is a sound from early disco records that is harder to reproduce than you ever thought it would be?

EC: The biggest difference is using a computer instead of a tape machine. We can edit stuff a lot more freely and easily explore many different avenues before committing to anything. Basically we have the luxury of writing and recording at the same time without having to spring for a professional studio and everything that comes with that. We use all the same instruments, but it all goes into a computer and it can all be painstakingly tracked one by one. On some of the tracks you’ll hear two string players but it sounds like a large ensemble because they each play the same melody 12 times using three or four different violins in varying positions in the room.

All of the synths we use are analog, and all of the instruments you hear are real. The closest thing to a true digital instrument we use is a Linn Drum. We also like to make things even more analog than they are before they go into the computer. Like taking an old synth, plugging that into to a weird guitar pedal, sending that into an old guitar amp, putting a ribbon mic in front of it and feeding that into a piece taken from a vintage mixing board and then into the computer.

The biggest obstacle is getting that punchy and tight drum sound. Dan has devoted an entire room in his apartment to that end. We crammed an entire studio’s worth of acoustic treatment into that one room and we’re still making adjustments here and there.

DB: I think the other big difference between then and now, which Eugene already touched on, is the number of people involved. A lot of dance music in that era had an assembly line of people involved in every part of the creative process: engineers, arrangers, producers, songwriters, and musicians. But we have to do everything ourselves. So on one hand, it’s great to have that sort of creative discretion, and on the other hand, given the kind of music we’re interested in, it’s a bit masochistic.

RC: How does your ‘memory of disco’ affect the disco you make? Do you knowingly exaggerate some elements while downplaying others, etc? What, if any, is the personal moment with disco each of you is attempting to recapture?

DB: Paraphrasing Barney Frank, I’m going to revert to my ethnic heritage by answering your question with a question: Can you be nostalgic about something you didn’t experience yourself?