Electric Blue | 03

"We Want To Play (JKriv Edit)" - Brief Encounter

"Party Track (Original Mix)" - Mr Fox

"Good Times (Compression Dub Mix)" - Charanga 76

"Dance, Dance, Dance" - Marta Acuña

"In And Out" - Willie Hutch

"The Beat Goes On (Labor of Love Dub)" - The Whispers

"Passaro Selvagem" - Os Carbonos

"Get On Up (Situation Edit)" - Jazzy Dee

"Come Let Me Love You (François K Instrumental)" - Jeanette Lady Day

"I'm So Hot" - Denise LaSalle

"Every Girl" - Ziggy Phunk

"Heaven Labor of Love Dub" - Funk Hunk

"The Apple (Hober Mallow Dub)" - Rainbow Team

“We Want To Play (JKriv Edit)” — Brief Encounter

The Bailey brothers' nine-piece soul outfit out of Wilkesboro, North Carolina recorded We Want To Play in 1981 at their own Dream Studios, on their own Music Town label. Wax Poetics has the long story of how Capitol Records, forced to choose between signing Brief Encounter or signing Maze, took Maze, sending the North Carolina band back to their Appalachian base to build infrastructure rather than hits. Athens of the North gave the title track a legitimate 7-inch reissue in late 2015, pairing it with "Sweet Tender Loving" on the flip, and JKriv's edit tightens the phrasing while extending the rhythm-guitar pocket.

“Party Track (Original Mix)” — Mr Fox

Peter Brown's Golden Flamingo imprint dropped "Smooth Talk" b/w "Party Track" in 1980, one of dozens of micro-labels Brown ran with Patrick Adams from a Harlem operation that has since been canonized as one of the most collectible label clusters in dance music. Red Bull Music Academy's Patrick Adams retrospective maps the full P&P web: Queen Constance, Sound of New York, Heavenly Star, Lonnie, La Shawn, distributed through Roulette and personally walked through Harlem record shops by Brown himself. "Party Track" is the instrumental B-side, with raw drum machine programming and synth that twangs more than it sustains. The seven-and-a-half-minute extended cut surfaced on BBE's Private Wax compilation in 2012, which is how most contemporary sets find it.

“Good Times (Compression Dub Mix)” — Charanga ‘76

The original "Good Times (Cómo Vamos a Gozar)" is Charanga '76's Latin disco cover of Chic, recorded for the band's 1979 LP No Nos Pararan with Spanish-and-English vocals layered over a charanga-and-disco rhythm bed. DJ Brian Biffo's Compression Dub Mix, released in early 2022, strips most of the vocals, pulls the strings down, and gives congas, timbales, and bass the run of the floor.

“Dance, Dance, Dance” — Marta Acuña

Patrick Adams produced the cult NYC disco single in 1977 for Peter Brown's P&P Records, the Harlem outfit Adams co-founded as an outlet for the experimental work that majors would not touch. The song originated as Universal Robot Band's instrumental "Thyme" earlier the same year, and Adams brought Acuña in within a few months to add a heavy-accented Spanish vocal over guitar ostinato, squelching synth, and a hand-clap break that has anchored loft-style sequences ever since. Acuña's vocal was reportedly her only commercial recording. The track lives in Adams' soulful-disco register, the floating, off-the-grid pocket that Larry Levan and David Mancuso pulled into rotation at Paradise Garage and the Loft.

“In And Out” — Willie Hutch

A boogie-funk driver, this title cut from Hutch’s 1982 Motown LP In and Out was tracked in Los Angeles and released as a 12 inch and LP single with vocal and instrumental variants. Willie Hutch was a veteran songwriter, arranger, and producer with Motown lineage, from soundtracks to Jackson 5 sessions. With his early 80s return to Berry Gordy's roster the year Cherry Red and SoulMusic later catalogued this as his post-disco "comeback" period. "In And Out" pairs his trademark string arrangement with Linn-style drum programming and synth bass, issued on a 12-inch with vocal and instrumental versions. The single made noise on R&B playlists and was part of the arc that runs from Foxy Brown and The Mack through his early-80s adult-soul productions. 

“The Beat Goes On (Labor of Love Dub)” — The Whispers

The 1979 source is "And the Beat Goes On" from The Whispers' SOLAR album, the breakthrough that turned the long-respected mid-charting vocal group into a top-shelf R&B act under Dick Griffey's management. Leon Sylvers III wrote the song with Stephen Shockley and William Shelby, produced the recording, and built the rhythm that would carry it to No. 1 on the Hot Soul Singles chart, No. 19 pop, and No. 2 in the UK, the group's biggest international showing. The Labor of Love dub circulating among DJs pares the vocal back to phrases and lets the rhythm guitar, claps, and extended bass figure run.

“Passaro Selvagem” — Os Carbonos

Mr Bongo's three-decade run as a Brazilian-reissue specialist is mapped in Bandcamp Daily's label profile, and the São Paulo group Os Carbonos sit at no. 95 in the label's long-running Brazil 45 series. The original "Pássaro Selvagem" was a 1981 B-side on a Copacabana Records compacto, with a bass figure that sits in dialog with Queen's "Another One Bites The Dust" and the kind of bright rhythm guitar that anchors much of the early-eighties Brazilian boogie canon. Mr Bongo issued the 7-inch reissue in 2023, pairing it with Sandra de Sá's "Palco Azul" on the flip, and the track has since been pulled into the contemporary disco-and-boogie circuit by Horse Meat Disco, surfacing on the 2025 Disco & Boogie from Brazil Vol. 1 compilation.

“Get On Up (Situation Edit)” — Jazzy Dee

Jazzy Dee's "Get On Up" appeared on Laurie Records (cat. LRST 101) in 1983, an octave-bass and Linn-snare boogie single that became a fixture on London pirate radio over the summer of its release. The Situation Edit gained physical life on a 2009 white-label Disco Deviance 12-inch (DD 07), pairing Jazzy Dee's edit with The Quantic Soul Orchestra's "Pushin' On (Situation Edit)" on the flip, both sides labeled for DJ use only with the original artists left off the labels. Will Holland's Quantic Soul Orchestra was Tru Thoughts' live, sample-free funk project, which makes for an ironic pairing of his vocal cut with a piece of unlicensed Jazzy Dee source material.

“Come Let Me Love You (François K Instrumental)” — Jeanette Lady Day

New York disco classic issued in 1981 on Prelude, produced and arranged by her husband Abraham Lincoln Day Jr., mixed at Sigma Sound by François Kevorkian, and mastered by Herb Powers Jr. at Frankford/Wayne. The vocal was the A-side, but the instrumental is the side that earned the record its second life. The B-side opens on a minute-and-a-half drum break that the Beastie Boys looped for "Hey Ladies" in 1989, and Crystal Waters built "100% Pure Love" on top of five years later. The FK pass gives the steel drums room to ring without losing the low end, and the bass line carries the melody while the vocal sits out.

“I’m So Hot” — Denise LaSalle

The title cut from her 1980 MCA album, produced by LaSalle herself through Ordena Productions, with rhythm and background sections recorded at Ardent in Memphis and strings and horns at the Sound Suite in Detroit. The vocal plays with call-and-response patterns that loop to tease the sexy chorus, with songwriter bluntness that had been her register since "Trapped by a Thing Called Love" hit gold in 1971. The single registered on R&B and dance charts as the album cut "Try My Love" picked up disco-club rotation, and the album is best understood as her last MCA play before the long Malaco run that began in 1983 and carried her through to her status as the unofficial Queen of the Blues.

“Every Girl” — Ziggy Phunk

Copenhagen-based Ziggy Phunk's Fully Fledged Disco Machine EP landed on Yam Who?'s Midnight Riot Records in 2015, and earned an EP-of-the-month review from Mixmag on release. "Every Girl" helped codify nu-disco’s blend of classic chords and modern production. Sampling Aretha Franklin's vocal's, the kick and bass are tight, more house than boogie, giving the track a contemporary feel. The Midnight Riot orbit, more broadly, is the contemporary gravitational center for this kind of work, where edit culture and original production meet.

“Heaven (Labor of Love Dub)” — Funk Hunk

Denver-based producer Funk Hunk released the Je Taime EP on Hotbox Boogie in 2019 with three vocal edits and a Labor of Love dub of "Heaven" closing the set. The dub loops mid-eighties soul figures with re-EQ'd drums and steady bass, trading the source vocal for spacing.

“The Apple (Hober Mallow Dub)” — Rainbow Team

Rainbow Team was the studio handle of Italian producers Michele Violante and Francesco Scaramuzzi, who recorded for Full Time Records between 1979 and 1982. Bandcamp Daily's Italo-disco starter kit places the moment in context: the early eighties Italian dance scene was a synth-laden, ESL mutation of classic disco that grew out of provincial production cultures rather than label centers, full of bright arpeggios, slinky basslines, basic drum machines, and a strain of amateurism that has aged into endearment. The original "Bite The Apple" is from Rainbow Team's 1981 self-titled LP, a clavinet-driven Italo-funk track that sits closer to the Roman post-disco school than the synth-only direction the genre took by 1983. The Hober Mallow Dub is an unofficial SoundCloud edit, subtitled "The Apple Edit," that loops the clavinet sections and stretches the breaks for mixing. An elegant closer for this bass heavy set.

Listen to: Electric Blue | 01