There’s nothing subversive about the tunes of Hercules and Love Affair, the dance-music classicists led by DJ/songwriter Andy Butler. They make irresistibly propulsive, delightfully distressing club songs, driven by tightly constructed beats and occasionally topped off with guest vocals from Antony (of & the Johnsons). But the widespread critical fawning they’ve enjoyed – last year’s selftitled debut managed to land a 9.1 from Pitchfork and to place a single in Entertainment Weekly’s list of the year’s ten best – is decidedly so: Hercules has managed to infiltrate the iPods of kids who still think ‘disco’ is a dirty word. It’s an impressive achievement for an act that comes from the insulated dancemusic scene, made even more so when considering that so much of Hercules and Love Affair, as Butler admits, is directly influenced by the work of genre-heroes who never crossed over in the same way. That’s something the folks at British staple dance label Renaissance surely had in mind when tapping Butler to launch their new compilation series, Sidetracked, a showcase for electronic musicians who also DJ. As could be expected, Butler completed the assignment with a heady, nostalgia-inducing mix, although it’s not as disco-centric as one might assume.
“I did want to compile something a bit more on the disco tip,” Butler explains of the album, which came out in July. “But the thing that I was really conscious about avoiding was rehashing what had been done before. I would go and research disco tracks, thinking ‘I bet this one hadn’t been put out on any compilations.’ And it’d be on this new compilation from 2003, or, oh, Dimitri From Paris had just put that out.” “I started looking at what I had been DJing mostly in the past year. A lot of it had been classical house and techno stuff and new beat records and early -’90s stuff, and a lot of it sampled disco. I thought, ‘well, that’d be fun.’ It won’t be entirely disco, but I’ll look at this first wave of producers in house music and techno that were sampling underground disco tracks that I love.” The first part of the compilation jumps from New York (Todd Terry Project, In Flagranti) to European (WestBam, Daniel Wang) acts, all lumped together through the virtue of being heavily influenced, like Butler himself, by classic disco. About three quarters of the way through, the mood shifts back to Butler’s original concept for Sidetracked – the classic disco songs themselves. “It’s not just disco music that I had been playing out; it was more about the listening disco. At the end, I put four songs” – from Rainbow Team, Gino Soccio, Ray Martinez & Friends, and Dr. Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band – “that directly inspired this new album that I’m doing. They’re a little bit softer, a little bit easy-listening disco pop, a little bit cocktail, and a little bit swingy.” If that sounds like the kind of jargon an amateur musicologist might spout, that’s because it is. Butler, who took music history courses at Sarah Lawrence College, is an avowed, disciplined music fan. “I guess I’m nerdy in that way,” he says. “Since I was a kid, I did that thing where I’d buy a record, and read the liner notes to see who they thanked, and check out [that band]. And it became this sort of linked chain of artists. I’ve always been doing this – researching, researching, researching – trying to better understand the music I’m listening to, trying to put it into context.” It’s a dedication that’s evident on Sidetracked as well as the Hercules oeuvre, which Butler refers to as heavily “referencebased.” That mentality – plus Butler’s background primarily in underground dance clubs, first in his native Denver and later in his adopted New York City – has led him to express surprise the project went farther than the first “Classique #2”/”Roar” 12-inch. The single, as well as the Hercules debut, was released on DFA, a fact that Butler credits greatly with helping Hercules escape genre-confinement.
“I didn’t push any of that. I’ve never been good at self-promotion – it was DFA, who had already cultivated this kind of scene, this reputation.” Surprisingly, considering the blog reverence Hercules enjoys, Butler says, “I’m not internet saavy. I’m kind of granny when it comes to it. Kids were already psyched on DFA on the internet — I just put on a little dinky MySpace with crappy jpegs, and kids started blogging about it. But there’s not one blog that I read.”
Even more surprising is Butler’s take on his music being widely distributed on file sharing networks, one that’s more in line with veteran major label band than an internet-fueled indie act. “When the album leaked, I felt a little weird. I had spent all this time, up through the process of dealing with the label and getting it out, and then in the blink of the eye all these people had it. And to hear ‘ehh, it’s alright. It kind of sucks…’ I spent a lot of time, and a lot of my own money on that! And then someone just zipped it. It made me feel like people don’t value music the way they used to value music.” It’s an issue that’s given him pause moving forward, “You have to get creative,” he now says, “about how you’re going to get your music out there and still make it your livelihood.”
For now, though, the focus is solely on the highly anticipated new Hercules album. Butler is deep into the production cycle but he’s hesitant to describe the sound, referencing an incident with an NME reporter: “I said something about Brian Eno for five seconds, and the next day she had written that I was [doing] a trance-driven Eno-inspired album. So, yeah, I’m not giving you anything to write some crazy shit about!” There is, however, “I Can’t Wait,” the new Hercules track slipped in between the classic cuts on Sidetracked, to analyze. “A lot of the compilation is sample based music,” Butler explains, “which is an approach I applied to that song in particular. That sort of playfulness, that sort of loud, brash sound of it, it made me think it fit perfectly with the other stuff on the compilation.”
But Butler warns not to read too much into “I Can’t Wait.”
“Some of the newer material is more bombastic, kind of kooky, and slightly sample based. But in general, I think the production technique and the production style from that era is kind of quite different. And for me, take away all the rhythm and the drum machines and everything, I’m not into sampling as much — I just like writing music.”
