Like Arthur Russell, another cult hero whose status rose years after he died of AIDS, San Francisco’s Patrick Cowley was known during his short lifetime for left-of-center disco; with songs like "Menergy" and "Megatron Man", he was the prime architect of the uptempo electronic disco variant Hi-NRG, later popularized by hits like Dead or Alive’s "You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)". Also like Russell, Cowley’s roots were avant-garde; where Russell's lineage came from experimental classical composers like Christian Wolff, Cowley drew inspiration from early Moog masters Tomita, Wendy Carlos, and Tangerine Dream. Unlike Russell, however, some of Cowley's work reached the mainstream: What Giorgio Moroder was to Donna Summer, Cowley was to LGBT pioneer Sylvester—the mustachioed background figure who contemporized a disco diva’s hot soul with cool technology.
Yet unbeknownst to even most of his disco fans, Cowley also created synth compositions in the even-more-underground medium of gay porn. Muscle Up is the second of two releases compiling this work, spanning time spent as a student at the City College of San Francisco to the period shortly before his death in 1982, when he scored his final smashes with Sylvester, Paul Parker, Loverde, and other Bay Area acts. As with 2013's School Daze, it takes its name from a real 1980 porn film, released by L.A.'s Fox Studio, that Cowley soundtracked. The music here documents an important cultural shift: As Super 8 gave way to VHS, DVD, and digital, much of gay and straight porn music alike would be synth-centric.
Like porn itself, electronic music references reality while signaling a fantastical break from it. For gay men born in the '50s like Cowley, synths suggested a refuge from repression, an escape hatch from a world where police entrapped, beat, and jailed them; where they lost their jobs or unwillingly severed family ties. This is one of the reasons why synth-disco milestones like Summer's "I Feel Love"—a track Cowley further intensified in his legendary 15+ minute remix—resonated so strongly with gay dancers of its era: Synth music was dream/sci-fi music, and it competed with R&B at the bathhouses where its suspension of time and space heightened the otherworldliness of unlimited sexual expression central to pre-AIDS gay experience, as if every man-on-man encounter after Stonewall and before Plague was a trip to the moon.
Appropriately, the first track of Muscle Up, "Cat's Eye", begins with a whooshing interplanetary-wind sound, and the ominous processional tom-toms that follow lets us know that sex is about to happen in the furtive way animals anticipate an earthquake. Cowley's keys ape ceremonial trumpets much like the pseudo-horn fanfare that opens Devo's Duty Now for the Future. That was 1979; this piece was allegedly recorded in '75. The recording is crude and there's a moment of cacophony when two martial drum patterns crossfade and collide, but even this accidental frisson suggests porn's glitchy, clandestine low-budget production values.
As a former drummer who switched to synths (but plays everything here besides didgeridoo and a bit of bass), Cowley comprehended both discipline and exploration. There's little on Muscle Up that sounds robotic; "5oz of Funk" echoes the syncopated beat and bass from Patti Jo's "Make Me Believe in You". Only once do machines keep time, on a 1975 instrumental demo version of "Somebody to Love Tonight", a song that Cowley revisited four years later with Sylvester, yielding understated but profoundly aching results. Even at this stage, it's supremely sultry, simmering with desires then considered utterly vile beyond the San Francisco bubble.
Today, the city's technology occupies a different kind of frontier, one often driven by motives not entirely artistic. And so it's instructive to hear what one guy then just blocks away from where Twitter now resides created with far cruder but perhaps more sensitive, pre-digital tools some 40 years ago. Rather than clean precision, he gets dirty invention, overheated homage. Instead of considered silences between notes, there's the strong suggestion of one man's impulsive sweat and spunk and stink. Cowley's interplanetary sex music is paradoxically earthy for the same reason his parallel cosmic club grooves were so righteous; because it reveled in freedoms long denied.
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