Strut compiles Walter Gibbons’ ‘Jungle Music’

Strut compiles Walter Gibbons’ ‘Jungle Music’

19 August, 2010 | 6.35AM

• Written by: Beatportal
• Filed under: Videos: disco, strut, walter gibbons

For a time, Walter Gibbons was one of the biggest names in disco, renowned for his skills behind the decks and even more famous for his feats at the mixing desk.

As a DJ, Gibbons’ seamless style of mixing was all but unparalleled. An eclectic selector, he wasn’t afraid to take risks, but just about any kind of music became “dance music” in his hands.

Gibbons’ pioneering DJ techniques fed his studio productions, and vice versa. In the early ‘70s, he was already cutting his own edits on tape, emphasizing climactic percussive passages and mind-bending collage effects; in 1976 he came on board at Salsoul, where his remix of Double Exposure‘s ‘Ten Percent’ earned its place in history as the first commercially available 12-inch single.

‘Ten Percent’ is just one of the many great tracks collected on ‘Jungle Music’, a new compilation of Gibbons mixes put together by the Strut label. It’s a varied collection, running from the dubby reveries of Jakki’s ‘Sun… Sun… Sun…’ to the over-the-top prog madness of Salsoul Orchestra’s ‘Magic Bird of Fire (Firebird Suite)’, and featuring the likes of both Gladys Knight and Arthur Russell. For anyone with even a smidgen of curiosity about classic disco, the album is well worth a listen. Read on for more details, plus audio.

Jakki, ‘Sun… Sun… Sun… (Walter Gibbons Original 12” Edit)’

Arthur Russell turns up twice—first with Dinosaur L‘s ‘Go Bang’, which Gibbons mixed into a blur of organs, congas, and electric bass, and then with a fairly bonkers version of ‘Calling All Kids’ that sounds almost like hip-house.

Dinosaur L, ‘Go Bang (Walter Gibbons Mix)’

There’s a great mix of Strafe’s electro classic ‘Set It Off’, and an even stranger version by the Harlequin Fours that anticipates DFA’s electro-disco aesthetic by two decades.

Harlequin Fours, ‘Set It Off (US 12” Version)’

If you’re interested in Gibbons, I’d highly recommend Tim Lawrence’s “Disco Madness: Walter Gibbons and the Legacy of Turntablism and Remixology,” which you can read in full online here; Peter Shapiro, one of disco’s best present-day historians and critics, also devotes several pages to Gibbons in his excellent book Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco, which you can read in its entirety on Google Books.

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