It's a Feedelity Affair

Album Review

It's a Feedelity Affair, the debut solo album from Hans-Peter Lindstrøm (following his full-length collaboration with Prins Thomas), is the soundtrack to an unrealized mystical science fiction/action epic directed by Wong Kar-Wai. Handily, it also functions as a greatest-hits compilation for the celebrated Norwegian dance producer, collecting most of the sides from his single releases on his own Feedelity Recordings imprint between 2003 and 2006. Many of the inclusions turn up here for the first time on CD, although several of them appear in slightly abbreviated, edited form, presumably to accommodate CD running time. Arranged roughly chronologically in the order of their release, these productions run the gamut from the brisk, cheerful robotic disco of aptly named early single "Fast and Delirious" to the slinky, vaguely sinister disco strut of "Limitations" to the meandering, tripped-out cosmic disco of "Further Into the Future" (a Prins Thomas co-production) to the balmy, downtempo equatorial disco of "Arp She Said." Yep, it's all disco in some way or another, including more or less any way you can imagine as long as it's instrumental and least vaguely electronic (actually not everything here is instrumental: the supremely dubbed-out "Music [In My Mind]," Lindstrøm's first Feedelity single, boasts some druggy, disorienting spoken/sung vocals courtesy of Christabelle, aka Isabelle Sandoo.) Otherwise, these tracks are united by a sense of adventurous musicality and a pervasive playfulness that is rarely so pronounced in electronic dance music — dig the myriad extended noodley keyboard solos, the dizzying sequence of chord changes toward the end of "Fast and Delirious," or the endless restless mutations that compose the stately, epic-length "There's a Drink in My Bedroom and I Need a Hot Lady." The compilation's undeniable peak and centerpiece is also Lindstrøm's signature tune, the epochal "I Feel Space," which nods to Donna Summer and Giorgio Moroder's Italo disco blueprint "I Feel Love" in its title and agitated, arpeggiated bassline, but looks toward the cosmos with its mesmerizing, gracefully yearning portamento synthesizer melody. ~ K. Ross Hoffman, Rovi