It Took Seconds

Six minutes and one second: One of the reasons I’m doing this is because I - like thousands of other people now - have a vault of music on my hard drive and barely any idea what it sounds like. Narrowing it down to a set length every day at least makes coming to terms with this more manageable.

So this is “Underwater” by Harry Thumann, which sits in a folder called “Legendary Clubs” that’s full of ‘greatest tracks’ from places like the Loft, Paradise Garage, Cinderella’s in Guildford, etc. Thumann was a German guy who made ‘space disco’ and is now dead, sadly. That’s all I know about him and you can guess how I know it. “Space disco” these days seems wide-ranging, mind-expanding but also relaxed and tasteful, certainly on a Lindstrom record you would not expect to find the WTF GUITAR SOLO that slides in at 4 minutes or so on “Underwater”.

No, this is “space disco” in a more forthright sense viz. it’s the theme for an imaginary space film, but at one remove: it’s the disco version of an imaginary theme for an imaginary space film, and imagining that film is like listening to Mego’s amazing disco Star Wars theme and deriving the existence of Star Wars from it.