Boccaccio Life 1987-1993 - un-silo-d tunes, when dance music was up for grabs
This week I have mainly been listening to the Hypnotone mix of Cascades by Sheer Taft, a duo signed to Creation Records in the early 90s, when Alan McGee went mad for Acid House and, briefly, tried to turn Creation into a dance label.
The song’s sweet Balearic grooves have been the perfect soundtrack for the coming of spring in Barcelona 2025, which might be a surprise for a song by a British duo, originally released 35 years ago, which isn’t available on Spotify and has way under 100,000 listens on YouTube.
But such is the life-giving power of compilations in general and one compilation in particular: Boccaccio Life 1987-1993, in which Olivier Pieters, the resident DJ at iconic Belgian club Boccaccio Life, and Stefaan Vandenberghe, a Boccaccio regular, compile 38 of the club’s anthems into a mouth-watering whole, featuring contributions from everyone from The Orb to Blake Baxter, Frank De Wulf to N-Joi.
(I say 38: my promo version has 40 songs, including Frankie Bones’ Call It Techno (House mix) and Tyree - Hardcore Hip House (Joe Smooth’s Too Deep remix), which don’t appear on Bandcamp.)
The vibe, for a lot of the record, is banging and sleazy, with take-no-prisoners techno hits from the likes of Suburban Knight (The Worlds), Robert Armani (Circus Bells) and Steve Poindexter (Computer Madness, inevitably). But the club evidently also had a mellow edge, if songs like Virgo’s Free Yourself and Frankie Knuckles’ Your Love were anthems.
And Cascades is very much in this category. I have vague memories of hearing the Hypnotone remix of Cascades back in the 90s - possibly on a tape that came free with Select - but I don’t remember it being this day-glo-credible, drifting from a noodly Tangerine Dream-y synth opening to breakbeat monster in a way that somehow only the 90s seemed to do. It was, apparently a Balearic classic, one also felt deeply in Belgium.
This is why I love compilations that are themed around clubs. Freed from the restraint of representing a particular genre or sound, they can stretch their musical wings a little, a recognition that most clubs aren’t utterly in thrall to one sound and the majority of clubbers enjoy variety on their nights out. The connecting point in the compilation is a club or even - if you want to push things a little further - a vibe, whatever that might mean.
If you were / are a regular at that particular club - which is my case with the various Bugged Out! / Electric Chair compilations - then these albums can be a powerfully nostalgic trip into the long dark nights of the soul. If not - and I never went to Boccaccio Life - then these compilations at their best should make you feel like you almost visited, like you have the smell of Boccaccio around your nostrils. On the evidence of Boccaccio Life 1987 - 1993, I think I would have really enjoyed its musically curious, lightly psychedelic sound.
The point is, a good club compilation should make you think that no one else in the world, or no other thing, would put together this collection of music. I think Boccaccio Life passes this particular test.
Of course, the other part of the title - the bit that proclaims 1987 - 1993 - is important too. I’m not so wilfully nostalgic to say that this was a better time for dance music. But it was undoubtedly a time where the generic walls had yet to be raised, which means that dancers at Boccaccio Life could enjoy a sonic mixture that took in everything from hip house to Bleep, with mood prevailing over genre.
Things weren’t just slightly messy in terms of genre either. Some of the productions themselves - notably A Guy Called Gerald’s Automanikk and Alice D In Wonderland’s Time Problem - feel rough around the edges, house music held together by sticky tape, Rizlas and the centrifugal force of a good party.
The album reposes on a heavy line up of Detroit techno and hard-hitting Chicago house - Baxter, Armani and all. But it mixes this with UK rave classics (Age of Chance’s Time’s Up [Timeless]), a touch of Bleep (LFO’s LFO), ambient house (The Orb’s A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain That Rules from the Centre of the Ultraworld [Orbital remix]), hip house (Tyree’s Hardcore Hip House [Joe Smooth’s Too Deep remix]), Balearic classics (Cascades), proto hardcore (Simon Sed’s Criminal), hands-in-the-air deep house (Your Love) and whatever the hell Alice D In Wonderland’s temporally challenged banger Time Problem - genuinely, one of the most chaotically unhinged pieces of electronic music I have ever heard - thinks it is.
You could call the tracklisting “eclectic”, maybe. But for me that word almost seems to suggest a choice, a DJ consciously trying to throw in all kinds of generic curveballs. And there’s nothing wrong with that. But the tracks on Boccaccio Life feel more natural, like many sides of a polyhedral die, all coming from just about the same place thematically, if not geographically.
We - or perhaps I - have an impression of Belgium clubs as filthily dark and intense hell holes where the intensity never drops beneath feverish. But the track list here suggests that the Boccaccio public appreciated both variety and sunlight. Frankly, any club that not only plays but makes an anthem of Alice D In Wonderland has got to have a sense of humour running through its bones. And who knew Belgium loved hip house so?
Importantly, Boccaccio Life also has the local element. Boccaccio opened in the rural town of Destelbergen, near Ghent, in 1963, and it is a pleasure to see the renowned Belgium DJ and producer Frank De Wulf (who first came to prominence as a DJ in Ghent) feature on the album with The Tape and his iconic remix of Human Resource’s Dominator, an early hardcore classic. Boccaccio Life was a club that took global influences, plastered them to the collective bosom and made them local - and this compilation proves this.
Could another club have made anthems of exactly this music? This strange Anglo / American / Belgian mix? Perhaps. But it seems unlikely. Could anyone recreate it today? Possibly. But a lot of people would think it was very odd.
Boccaccio Life also does the other thing that any good compilation should do, in bringing together a load of music that isn’t easily heard elsewhere. Sure, Your Love and Dominator were massive hits. But they are the exceptions: only about a quarter of this compilation’s mammoth track list is currently available on Spotify (as far as I can make out) and Music Man, the the Ghent label releasing the record, is doing god’s work in bringing these songs back.
I didn’t even know, for example, that Roger Sanchez once recorded as Egotrip, much less that he had released a spooky bleep and bass classic called Dreamworld in 1990. Nor was I aware that Joey Beltram and Frankie Bones got together as Mental Mayhem in 1990 and released an electro / bleep masterpiece by the name of Where Are They Hiding.
I had no idea that Frankie Bones had used the iconic Trading Places sample that Masters of Work would make their own on The Ha Dance on his own Call It Techno back in 1989. (Although this then sent me back to Whosampled, where I found that that Clivillés and Cole had used the same sample in their 1988 track Seduction (by Seduction).
Lessons like this are all over Boccaccio Life 1987-1993, a compilation that traces a slightly unusual line through electronic music history, capturing a time when everything felt up for grabs in the wonderfully un-silo-d world of late 80s / early 90s dance music, where hardcore, bleep and house could happily live cheek by jowl in a way that wouldn’t wash these days.
Boccaccio Life, the club, is probably best known for its role in developing the Belgium New Beat. Fred Brown’s Roman Days, a track that often pops up on New Beat compilations, also appears here, offering a charming musical through line from New Beat to techno that serves to underline the compilation’s local feel.
But this excellent compilation stretches the club’s legacy beyond what was, ultimately, a fairly short-lived musical scene. The club may have closed in 1993 but perhaps the best praise I can offer to Boccaccio Life 1987-1993 is what if was still open I would make sure I was there this weekend. And if I could go back in a time machine, all the better.
15 known classics from Boccaccio Life 1987-1993
Age Of Chance - Time's Up (Timeless)
Tronikhouse - The Savage & Beyond (Savage Reese Mix)
Robert Armani - Circus Bells
Human Resource - Dominator (Frank De Wulf Remix)
Sheer Taft - Cascades (Hypnotone Mix)
A Homeboy, A Hippie & A Funki Dredd - Total Confusion (Heavenly Mix)
Steve Poindexter - Computer Madness 04:16
CLS - Can You Feel It (In House Dub)
LFO - LFO (Leeds Warehouse Mix)
The Orb - A Huge Evergrowing Pulsating Brain That Rules From The Centre Of The Ultraworld (Orbital Dance Mix)
Frankie Knuckles - Your Love
Laurent X - Machines (Apocalypse Mix) 06:47
Virgo - Free Yourself
E-Dancer - Feel The Mood (N.Y. Groove Mix)
A Guy Called Gerald - Automanikk (Derrick May The Force Be With You Mix)
10 unknown (to me) classics from Boccaccio Life 1987-1993
Simon Sed - Criminal
33 1/3 Queen - Searchin’
The D.O.C. - Portrait Of A Masterpiece (CJ's Ed-Did-It-Mix)
Alice D In Wonderland - Time Problem (Techno Speed Work)
Egotrip - Dreamworld (World Of Dreams Mix)
Revelation - First Power (Original Mix)
Mellow Man Ace - Rhyme Fighter (House Dub)
The Gherkin Jerks - Strange Creatures
N-Joi - Jupiter Re-Dawn
Tyree - Hardcore Hip House (Joe Smooth’s Too Deep remix) (on my promo not available on Bandcamp, by the looks of things.)
Some listening
Rufige Kru - Goldikus (feat. Cleveland Watkiss)
A new Rufige Kru tune featuring a sample of Cleveland Watkiss at the Blue Note in 1993? Where do I sign up? But this tune isn’t just about nostalgia: the production is razor-sharp and the decision to add a (somewhat muffled) live recording adds a touch of flawed humanity to the tune, something that modern jungle often misses in its drive for alien perfection.
Bruce - Burned Alive (First Degree edit)
As the title of Bruce’s new single suggests, this isn’t exactly a record to chill out to. It is, instead, the sound of panic on vinyl, a nerve-ending jangling mixture of screeching alarms, growling noises, explosions and a bass line designed to undermine. Burned Alive reminds me vaguely of Pepe Bradock’s Rhapsody in Pain, in fact, in that it seems hell bent on doing everything possible to unnerve. The difference being that Burned Alive has a beat so fantastically snappy you can only dance while the world explodes around you.
JIALING - Percolate on Acid (Sister Zo remix)
JIALING’s original Percolate on Acid was a little straight-laced. So it is a pleasure to hear that Sister Zo has fed the original all kinds of bad things on her remix, leaving it queasy but still up for a dance or a fight, whatever comes first. There is a moment towards the start of Zo’s remix that sounds exactly like the spinning floor sensation of a drunk person in repose, which is an impressive feat of sonic engineering, if a little evil.
Emma-Jean Thackray - Wanna Die
I’ve heard few records of late that sound as genuinely, unsettling raw as Emma-Jean Thackray’s second album, Weirdo. The record was conceived “as a meditation on neurodivergence and mental health” only to change (I assume dramatically) after the death of Thackray’s long-term partner in January 2023. It’s easy to read too much into song titles but when faced with names like Wanna Die, Please Leave Me Alone, What is the Point and Black Hole, it makes for uncomfortable listening. Then there are the lyrics: “I don’t wanna die / I just want to sleep a while / maybe forever.” from Wanna Die, is a pretty chilling example.
This feel of unease is reflected in the music. Instead of the spiritual jazz of Thackray’s debut, Yellow, Weirdo swings all over the place, from chirpy (but, no, not really) indie pop on Wanna Die to P funk on Stay, to disco (Save Me) to grunge (Maybe Nowhere), all tied together by Thackray’s jazz-inflected songwriting, the downbeat feel of the lyrics frequently thrown into sharp contrast by the upbeat production. This is a deeply strange, utterly fantastic record and one you suspect Thackray really had to make.
Baalti / A.R. Rahman - Tere Bina
For Daytimers’ debut album, the British South Asian collective have been let loose on Sony Music India’s extensive catalogue, with the brief being to update the music for clubs.
The first single from it borrows from A R Rahman’s Tere Bina from the 2007 film Guru. Rahman is, even an amateur like me knows, a a giant of Indian music, who has been sampled by everyone from Rick Ross to Tricky, and New York duo Baalti do a sterling job of keeping Tere Bina’s elegiac spirit while sticking a dirty great 2-step beat underneath it, as if that was what Rahman was thinking about all the time.
Incidentally, this song makes me long for Alexkid’s remix of Mychael Danna’s Fuse Box, from the Monsoon Wedding soundtrack. We used to listen to it all the time back in the 2000s but it appears to have dropped off the earth. If anyone has an MP3, do please get in touch!
Things I’ve done
Line Noise podcast with JB Dunckel
It's another vintage Line Noise episode this week, as I revisit an interview I did with Jean-Benoît Dunckel for Radio Primavera Sound in 2022, around the release of his solo album Carbon. (An excellent record, by the way.) Dunckel is perhaps best known as half of the iconic duo Air - one of my favourite bands ever - but he is also a solo artist and renowned soundtrack composer. We talked about ambiguity, space, Sex UFOs and, of course, Air.
The playlists
“Do not keep children to their studies by compulsion but by playlist.” So (almost) spoke Plato. And he knew what he was talking about. (Most of the time anyway.) Luckily, I have two playlists: The newest and bestest 2025; and The newest and the bestest (unbridled by time). Do follow them for all the best new music.