Cafe Mancuso, Bordeaux, France, mix

This recording come from the final day of the first anniversary celebrations organised by Cafe Mancuso, an audiophile cafe opened in Bordeaux by Guillaume Taillieu and Philippe Bonnet. The evening began with Yoshi Hitchcock from Deviant Disco leading a conversation with me about David and the Loft. After that it was party time. To be honest I wasn’t sure if there’d be dancing; Gui has forewarned that there’d never been a dance event in the cafe and that Bordeaux didn’t have much of a party scene. Slowly but steadily, however, the floor began to fill, and the evening turned out to be one of the most joyous, expressive and powerful that I’ve experienced. The hard dancing even resulted in the records placed on the right turntable skipping due to floor movement. I hope that doesn’t get in the way of post-party enjoyment :-)

Whatever happened--and these things can be hard to quantify--it seemed to be something of a first. It communicated itself through the sense of excitement in the air, the expression on people's faces, the response to certain records, the joy that vibrated around the room at the end of the night. At one point a dancer came up said how grateful he was to have been introduced to a whole new world of music. Another came up and said he had just experienced a musical orgasm. A third wondered out loud why one record (the instrumental version of "Mystery of Love") had no lyrics and subsequently started to belt out her own improvised lyrics on the spot. It was incredible to see the faces and bodies of others as they responded to the funky, driving strangeness of the François Kevorkian remix of "Go Bang" as if they couldn't quite believe what they were hearing but were happy to go along with their involuntary bodily responses. By the end of the night there was just so much joy in the room.

The wonder of these Loft classics--which, more than any other set of records I know of, have the power to compel people to come together, relax, move their bodies, smile at one another, and throw themselves into the vortex of the dance floor--could be seen all over the faces of those who gathered and danced their hearts out. At the end of it all I was like, damn, I want to come and live in Bordeaux!

I felt like I'd experienced a slightly outlandish experiment produce a positive result. There might be no such thing as a "wrong town" yet nor did Bordeaux resemble the kind of urban setting where Loft-style parties have historically taken root. It didn't matter. As hosts Gui and Philippe Bonnet demonstrated, a Loft-style party can work pretty much anywhere, just so long as certain rudimentary elements are in place.

Bordeaux talk

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Last night I started to pack my record bag for this Saturday's trip to Bordeaux, where I'll be giving a talk about David Mancuso/the Loft and selecting some Loft classics to mark Cafe Mancuso's first anniversary. I've been buying all sorts of music over the last year or two, and every now and again I've wondered what David would thought if I'd played some of these purchases to him — because it wasn't easy to play a record to David and get him to respond with a nod of approval! Yet going through the box I've been preparing for the next All Our Friends party at Chats Palace, I was struck by the very decent number of Loft records I found there.

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David really did have an amazing ear for music. Or maybe along with the dancers he contributed to the creation of a third ear, as he once told me, because David always felt that Loft records were collectively selected. So those records that are still in the current box and are in so many people's current boxes--those records have instigated an awful lot of moves over the years and are collectively cherished. It'll be interesting to see how they go down in Bordeaux. Thanks to Gui for hosting and inviting!

LSD x

Saturday, November 3 2018 / Cafe Mancuso, 24 Rue Ravez 33000 Bordeaux

David Mancuso's Loft on RBMA

Jeff "Chairman" Mao  has published a momentous oral history of David Mancuso's Loft for Red Bull Music Academy. The history is comprised of interviews with Vince Aletti, John Benitez, Barbie Bertisch, David Felton, Fred Flores Ernesto Green, François Kevorkian, Louis Kee, Hiromi Kiba, Danny Krivit, David Liu, Tina Magennis, Colleen Murphy, Paul Raffaele, Mark Riley, Josie Ritondo, Alex Rosner, Douglas Sherman, Nicky Siano, Will Socolov, Elyse Stefanishin, Yukihiro Suzuki, Luis Vargas and Donna Robbins Weiss--I hope I'm not leaving anyone out. Jeff even spoke with me; I have fond memories of an intense interview conducted on a scorching hot day in NYC in early May last year. It's a huge piece of writing and a valuable addition to the historicisation of the Loft--thank you, Jeff! 

While I'm here, I'd very much like to flag up a crowdfunding campaign organised by Ben Goldfarb on behalf of the wonderful Judy Russell, a longstanding employee at Vinyl Maniac and Downtown 81, a regular at the Paradise Garage and a close friend of many in the scene, including Larry Levan, who fell on hard times after becoming ill. It was wonderful to be able to interview Judy and include some of her memories and insights in Life and Death on the NY Dance Floor. Please donate! 

Lastly, the New York Times has published an obituary of the magical Boyd H. Jarvis, already much missed. The article ends with sister Yvette Jarvis recounting how Boyd made and recorded music until his death. What else was he going to do?

Happy Birthday David Mancuso

Photo by Tomas Borbás, work paid for, please contact for permission if using commercially, http://insicht.de/contact/

It'd be lovely to be able to wish David Mancuso "happy birthday" over the phone or even in person, but as this is the first year when that's not possible, at least 20 October can be a day of remembering. It's a little surreal to think that if David were still around he'd be 73; it seems like only the other day that we were spending time together in London in the run-up to a Lucky Cloud Sound System party and David reflected on the milestone of having recently turned 64, that being a big birthday for any Beatles fan.

It's David's birthday so I had to pick out a picture with balloons, so here's a picture of David at the Light in London in 2007, almost certainly during preparations for our Lucky Cloud Sound System summer party. Below I'll paste a little book extract that opens with a reflection on "Loft time" before describing the importance of balloon's to David's party environment--an environment that, beginning in Japan and continuing on Second Avenue before it also took root in London, could travel (with care).

Love saves the day...

The absence of clocks contributed to the dance dynamic. In the everyday world the clock signifies the unstoppable forward movement of teleological time, but party time unfolds in a different dimension—thus Mancuso’s decision to print Salvador Dali’s melting watches on the Love Saves the Day invitation. When clocks are nowhere to be seen, time starts to dissolve, and this provided the dancers at the Loft with an opportunity to forget their socialized selves—the person who has to get up at a certain time, go to work at a certain time, take lunch at a certain time, leave work at a certain time, etc.—and experiment with a different cycle. "Once you walked into the Loft you were cut off from the outside world," says Mancuso. "You got into a timeless, mindless state. There was actually a clock in the back room but it only had one hand. It was made out of wood and after a short while it stopped working."

Time, though, didn’t simply stand still, but went into symbolic reverse thanks to Mancuso’s practice of decorating the Loft with hundreds and hundreds of balloons. "Everybody loves balloons and they don’t cost a million dollars," he says. "There were always lots and lots of balloons." The decor created a reassuringly familiar setting, drawing guests into the therapeutic and nostalgic domain of their childhood and the set-piece birthday party. "It was a childlike experience, not childish. You could let yourself go." Inflated with just the right amount of air and/or helium, the multicolored balloons either drifted just below the ceiling or bobbled along at chest height, encouraging dancers to participate in the creation of a bewildering display of Brownian motion. "It was a very safe environment. People could regain what might have been lost."

From Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music, 1970-79, 24-25.