Disco Inferno – The 5 EPs
I’ve spent much of last week clinging on to known classics and weathering the first wave of heartbreak that follows the crumbling of a serious relationship. While I very much still have a sense of adventure and a need for discovery, experience leads me to believe that comfort comes first. That’s why I wrote about Loveless, that’s why I wrote about A Death in the Gunj. And that’s why this Disco Inferno compilation – the 5 EPs. Because a, it’s an album that has been in my (entirely hypothetical) all-time top ten since the very first time I heard it several years ago. And b, it’s a record that gives me a great deal of comfort.
It’s hard to pin down the sound of the 5 EPs, but I find it remarkably easy to pin down how the 15 songs in the compilation have always made me feel. The album always conjures the same images in my mind; they’re always just as vivid, always just as moving. I imagine a lazy post-school afternoon in the neighbourhood where I lived from ages 2 to 7. I see myself on the backseat of the family vehicle, a blue-and-white two-wheeler, as mummy drives me home from my creche after spending her day studying at university. I feel the warm, humid afternoon on my neck. I see brown-grassed hillocks to my left, a half-broken concrete wall keeping its weeds from grabbing me. Somewhere nearby, the sound of an almost pre-industrial construction site: the muggy stillness of a Thane summer disturbed by slow the rhythmic clanging of a hammer and the buzzing of a scooter. Afternoons were just slower then, and it seemed to me that people like mummy and daddy, and people like the guys working at the construction site, were interrupting everyone else’s languor with their enthusiasm, hard work, and aspirations for a better life.
I look forward to the time I spend writing these every day. For a couple of hours, I’m away from the challenges of the present. Away from revenues, costs, margins, the returning of rings, the collection of vinyls, the apportioning of guilt. For a couple of hours every day, I’m elsewhere. In the McCluskieganj of the seventies, in a hostel room in the noughties, in the Thane of the nineties. The purpose of art – and its appreciation – is often to transport. Disco Inferno’s The 5 EPs does this job of transporting in a truly idiosyncratic way.
Nostalgia takes on several different forms, and is triggered by all sorts of music. There’s music that’s either from, or that reminds you of the sound of a particular period in your life. It’s no surprise that when I see the words chak dum dum, I’m immediately transferred to the same neighbourhood I described earlier; Dil To Pagal Hai was the biggest hit of the last year I lived there. But then there’s a particular sort of music – the 5 EPs sort of music – that triggers this weird nostalgia for no direct reason. I didn’t grow up listening to experimental alt-rock by a band that attached MIDI triggers to their instruments, triggering evolving samples with each strum, with each snare hit. In fact, the vocabulary of this sort of music would’ve seemed completely alien to me in the mid-90s. But there’s just something about this album that transports me there. I wish I had a deep insight as to why that is, or why this happens, but I’ve been trying to find out why ever since I first discovered this band, and this particular release on One Little Independent Records, but to no avail.
I usually like to tie up these pieces with a neat explanation to go with my central observation. In fact, I think that’s pretty core to what I usually bring to the table. But this time, I have no real explanation, only exploration.
Just please listen to the album. Maybe you’ll feel this way too.
