“The sound of the future”: The 1968 electronic album that inspired disco
Disco, like virtually every genre, emerged from an amalgamation of disparate influences and social circumstances, and although it was within the underground nightclubs of 1970s New York that its distinctive rhythm first got people moving, Giorgio Moroder places the ground zero of disco revolution years earlier.
No revolution can be undertaken by one person alone, but the landscape of disco music would have been virtually unrecognisable were it not for the production mastery of Moroder. Through his moulding of artists like Donna Summer and his pioneering adoption of electronic influences, the producer was key in breaking that disco sound into the musical mainstream, where it has remained in one form or another ever since.
Moroder’s recordings, and 1977’s Donna Summer smash ‘I Feel Love’, in particular, marked some of the earliest instances of electronic music infiltrating the mainstream pop charts, and it is no surprise that the Italian disco master was subsequently sought out by everybody from Blondie to Sparks. Previous to that landmark disco classic, electronic music had largely been the reserve of experimental composers, researchers, and musical outliers like Kraftwerk.
“The record that triggered my imagination with the synthesiser,” Moroder once recalled to The Talks, “was an album called Switched-On Bach by Wendy Carlos, a collection of pieces by Bach played on synthesizers.”
Released back in 1968, while Moroder’s career was just beginning, Carlos’ LP was, at its core, a demonstration of the sound and potential of the Moog synthesiser, and although it outraged certain classical music purists, it was a groundbreaking release nonetheless.
That album wasn’t short of accolades upon its release, either. Topping the US classical charts and even earning three Grammy Awards, the LP ushered in an entirely new era for electronic music. For Moroder, especially, the album changed his musical outlook indefinitely: “I realised that the possibilities of synthesisers are endless and that I wanted to translate that into pop music,” he declared.
‘I Feel Love’ was the realisation of that ambition; a dancefloor smash with a sonic profile that could have been beamed down from the outer cosmos. “I thought I had something new, but I absolutely didn’t know that it would have such a strong effect,” the composer said of his masterpiece. “I only realised that a few months later when Brian Eno told David Bowie that he heard the sound of the future in ‘I Feel Love.’”
Two artists as visionary as Bowie and Eno, citing the song as being “the future”, should act as a good indicator of just how revolutionary the track was back in the 1970s. In its wake, countless imitators and tributes were spawned, and the Moroder sound spread like wildfire across the landscape of both disco and the pop charts.
If there was ever a watershed moment for electronic music merging with the pop world, then it was ‘I Feel Love’, but that fateful song might never have come to fruition were it not for the Moog mastery of Wendy Carlos nearly a decade prior.
