A few dozen "2006: Year of You" think pieces later, we know a lot about "You": Web 2.0 has democratized the media, caught the eye of corporations from Silicon Valley to Detroit, and sparked new ways to call 'em as we see 'em. However, the rise of user-generated content has also accelerated the conversion of gestalt experience into symbolic form-- most basically, 1's and 0's-- and something usually gets lost in this translation. If I'm busy recording a moment, how can I be fully present in it? What most defines our lives nearly always defies documentation.
No wonder Sweden's Sally Shapiro prefers to keep her offline self to herself. Shapiro reputedly declines to be photographed by strangers, and she, like 1980s Italo disco singer Valerie Dore, records under an English pseudonym. (Shapiro hasn't told us her real name, and she doesn't do interviews-- if "she" exists at all.) Just six months ago, songwriter/producer Johan Agebjörn started posting on message boards announcing her debut 12" "I'll Be By Your Side"-- Pitchfork's #27 track of 2006. Not since Tigermilk-era Belle and Sebastian has an artist gotten so much publicity from refusing to do publicity. Here, as then, such reticence befits the music, which speaks, sensitively and eloquently, for itself.
"I'll Be By Your Side" returns to open Shapiro's first full-length, Disco Romance. Like Tigermilk's "The State I Am In", it's an auspicious introduction to an, ohhh, introverted world. Agebjörn's Italo-inspired tracks build gradually, drop melodies that could melt whatever global warming leaves behind, and then hold on for dear life. Shapiro's guileless vocals put an angelic face on her producer's melancholy, but she, too, is clinging to the past. Disco Romance is deeply nostalgic. It's the nostalgia of someone who has loved and lost and knows damn well it was indeed "better"-- no matter how gnawing the present hurt.
Sure, Italo's comeback has been here for years. Just ask Morgan Geist, Alec DeRuggiero, Hans-Peter Lindstrøm, or Mrs. Guy Ritchie. Fundamentally a modern indie pop album (dig the cover art's references to old Heavenly and Field Mice design schemes), Disco Romance uses its sonic heritage not so much as a blueprint as for thematic material. Though German label ZYX Music didn't coin the term until 1983, Italo disco began when the strings, horns, and sweaty glitz of the Village People, K.C. & the Sunshine Band, or "Disco Duck" gave way to something new: an electronic-based amalgam of throbbing bass lines, aching synth arpeggios, and low-tech drum thuds. Like 80s house or 90s lo-fi, the genre that sprang almost fully formed from Giorgio Moroder's knobs, via Donna Summer's "I Feel Love", was cheap and easy to imitate.
In Agebjörn's hands, Italo is also essentially sad: Perhaps the first dance music made in solitude. "I'll Be By Your Side" draws its emotional depth from the way the arrangement implicitly contradicts Shapiro's vows of eternal togetherness. Detouring into intergalactic lounge, "I Know" shows its lonely narrator's struggle to go on believing those promises. If Shapiro really knows, then why does she have to keep telling herself so-- why are those squiggly synth solos so tragic? "Just tell me how I can hold onto this moment for now," she asks. The key changes, bass dives, and our moment extends for another two minutes.
Back on paper, the album should be as giddy as it makes Pitchfork HQ. After all, Agebjörn's love-oriented songs mostly polish up the simple, frequently nonsensical lyrics of classic Italo. "Be mine in the sunshine," Shapiro sings on "Hold Me So Tight", but it's beneath a deluge of rainy-day synths. Even on "Anorak Christmas", a cover of Swedish twee-poppers Nixon, Shapiro sings the words "please don't go away" as if she doesn't plan to be heard. "Find My Soul" reaches out a trembling hand, and ambient lullaby "Sleep in My Arms" is as desolate as a Star Trek captain's log. Disco Romance turns the Smiths' happy-music-with-sad-lyrics formulation on its head-- and then you dance to it.
Yep, style is ephemeral. Agebjörn can't bring back vanished innocence by recreating the sounds of our youth any more than Shapiro can keep love alive just by saying the words. They can, however, control the emotional experience of anyone who has ears-- now, and as long as their songs remain available in some form. Disco Romance takes history's revision process into its own hands with two remixes, one a slick "Norwegian electrojazz" take on "Find My Soul" and the other Netherlands electro artist Rude66's vocoder-ghostly, acid-squelched "I'll Be By Your Side" revamp. They're not new songs, but they provide another means of prolonging the present.
The Web's cacophony privileges criticism. You won't find God in scriptural commentaries, or save any children watching Hotel Rwanda, but you can fall in love to "My Love" (in theory). If verbalization is inherently reductive, then writing about music is a way to encode the moment loss-free. The track always endures. In his book Air Guitar, MacArthur Fellowship-winning arts critic Dave Hickey explains: "Even though my writing about art might momentarily intervene between some object and its beholders, the words would wash away, and the writing, if it was written successfully into its historical instant, could never actually replace the work or banish it into the realm of knowledge." All that lasts is music; Shapiro and Agebjörn know.
