Today I'm happy to share with you the second installment in our Disco Island Edits series.
The six tracks composing Volume 2 were pieced together with care by our crate-digging cohort in NYC, Sticky Dojah, real name Phil Lembke. Phil has been an enthusiastic supporter of AGS for a few years now, his love of local music really kicking in when his father-in-law moved to Hawai‘i Island. Annual family vacations to Hilo side yielded Phil with a growing collection of hard-to-find Hawaiian gems, as evidenced by his (current) photo on his Bandcamp page, where he's seen holding up a copy of Nohelani Cypriano's In The Evening LP, and the crazy rare album by Greg Yoder.
Listen to Disco Island Edits Volume 2 by Sticky Dojah on Bandcamp:
Keeping up with releases has been a challenge, especially when at any given time I'm firing off ideas (just ideas, not even actual releases), spitballing with the AGS crew. A lot of that activity also happens in my head, and I've been learning that while not an uncommon trait, especially for the "entrepreneurial" type, it's something that must be managed in order to manifest into actual results.
Disco Island Edits was one of those ideas, bouncing around my head for a long time. I had a handful of DJ edits I'd made over the last two years that I wanted to share in some way. So I finally did, in January 2020 I published what I'd hoped to be the first in several volumes of a series of edits, reworks and remixes. You can find that over here.
Those tracks were inspired by Bart Bascone's 1979 LP entitled Disco Island, a non-stop party of high tempo (aka 135BPM) dance tracks on both sides of the record. In my opinion, the album suffers from too much cheesiness — too often, Bascone's lyrics play too heavily on Hawaii's romanticized appeal aimed at tourists.
I could be wrong; I've never met Bart Bascone (if anyone reading this knew him personally, please share your stories in the comments below). But as I returned to the album every so often, I found myself unable to listen to an entire side of the record because of its level of cheesiness. The only DJs I know who've been able to play songs from this LP convincingly are Oliver Seguin and Jun "JxJx" Saito. Me? I'd rather pare down the best parts and recreate my own edits would be stronger on a dancefloor — at least in the 21st century. Discotheques in the 1970s were different, I'm sure!
Hence, Disco Island Edits was born. You can find Volume 1 over here.
Back to my original point — for months I was tossing around the idea for a subsequent volume, and I wanted to highlight someone else's efforts in elevating tracks with edits. Phil (Sticky Dojah) and I had many conversations about it, and so I kept pushing. Kept asking, "What do you think about contribution to the series?" Phil was down. But there wasn't really much else to show for the series, except for the first installment. No one knew if another volume would ever manifest!
Persistence pays off. We're here today with Volume 2!
Big thanks to Phil for letting me bug him on the regular about this project. It's something I'd like to continue doing, with subsequent installments created by more friends and cohorts of the label. And who knows, maybe we'll have enough material to properly release a vinyl 12" of the best cuts from the series. If you'd like to see that happen, let us know in the comments below.