Adrian Younge - Afro-Disco Makossa

Adrian Younge has spent a decade turning Linear Labs into a laboratory for analog obsession, and Afro-Disco Makossa is the first record he has made there built specifically for the dance floor. The conceit is a good one: what would a Ghanaian producer in 1976 have come up with if handed the assignment of building an American disco record for a hometown crowd? Younge answers it the only way he knows how, which is to say entirely to tape, with the room noise left in.

The result sits somewhere between Fela's horn charts and a Philadelphia string section. "Feel The High Life" opens on the kind of loping bassline that makes a floor decide for itself, "Shake Down" pushes the tempo, and the title track closes the record with an arrangement that earns the makossa in its name. Younge plays most of it himself, as usual, and the drums are recorded the way drums were recorded before anyone thought to fix them.

Anyone who followed his Jazz Is Dead sessions with Tony Allen and Ebo Taylor will recognize the reverence here, but this is a lighter, sweatier record than those — less archival, more concerned with the next four minutes than with the last fifty years. Six tracks, no filler, built for a DJ of any era.

Pressed on standard black vinyl by Linear Labs.