A few years ago – peaking in 2007 - “cosmic disco” was a brief clubland rage. It came mostly from Oslo and consisted of calm, bearded Norwegian dudes creating a fabulous psychedelic stew of groovy house, Italo-disco, and their own ineffable proggy weirdness. Where filter disco, the unkillable dance-pop sub-genre kick-started by Stardust’s “The Music Sounds Better With You”, has mostly been hugely unadventurous, relying on basic retro pilfering, cosmic disco was always marinated in the deep, druggy pulse of the best nightlife. Names such as Lindstrom, Prins Thomas and Todd Terje rightly garnered a reputation but there was also a wild card in the pack: DJ Strangefruit, aka Pål Nyhus.
As Mungolian Jetset, together with producer Knut Sævik, Nyhus has created some of the most far out electronic dance sounds to come from Scandinavia in recent years, notably an epic rolling remix of LSB’s “Original Highway Delight” and, for my money, one of the top acid techno freak-outs of all time, Pizzy Yelliott’s loony assault on Bob Marley’s “Could You Be Loved”. Their first album was an experimental jazz affair, their second a collection of work-to-date (including the tracks aforementioned), but their third, Schlungs, is much more focused and accessible. Happily, this does not mean they have straightened out their act.
The album begins with a didgeridoo-addled tribal throb that explodes into Strauss’s “Also Sprach Zarathustra” (the 2001: A Space Odyssey music), and there’s plenty more off-the-wall behaviour, notably the warped percussive groove of “Shelton’s on a Bender”. There is also, however, a concerted effort to write proper songs, even if the lyrics veer into the bizarre and George Clinton-esque. The space-cadet vocoder jam of “Moon Jocks N Prog Rocks”, the kinky bondage funk of “Ties N Downs” and the straightforward Eighties-flavoured party anthem “Bella Lanay” all showcase an off-kilter world view that's now attached to music for disco hippies, weekend dance floors and even, Heaven forbid, daytime radio.
Listen to "Moon Jocks N Prog Rocks"
