Message from
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>> Felix da Housecat looks back to
black and up to the stars

SIGN OF THE TIMES: Felix da Housecat

by JACK OATMON

There’s a commonly spun yarn about a particular seaside soup vendor who has been brewing the same pot of chowder for decades, constantly adding just enough of the days’ catch to fill in the portion that’s been sold. The idea may be a bit hard to swallow, but the soup reportedly goes down smooth and delectably. Felix Stallings, aka Felix da Housecat, is a bit like this urban legend in that he’s been producing house tracks for 20 years, but always blending fresh cuts into his tailored mix to keep his flavour at the front of the cookbook. This time around, with Virgo Blaktro & the Movie Disco, Felix stirs a welcome dollop of electrofunk à la P-Funk into the retro-futuristic glam house that he and his ilk brought to prominence earlier in the decade.

“I wanted to do the black style of electronic music and have my own black take on it,” says Stallings. “My father’s the real reason I made this record. He said, ‘Maybe you should make a black record.’ He listened to my tracks from Devin Dazzle and he was into them, but you know, they sound very European. So he was always wondering why I couldn’t go to my roots. He’s a saxophone player. I liked doing the whole European thing because it was different for me, but I wanted to go Blacktro on it, you know? But it’s not just a colour thing, because the album does have European ’80s roots in some songs.”

The disc also pays due to Prince and contains both a reprise of Devo’s “Snowball,” entitled “Sweetfrosti,” as well as pronounced shades of Giorgio Moroder and Daft Punk as the album progresses. Stallings continues to describe that the disc is a representation of both his past and his current life.

“I was recording in Barcelona, but [co-producer] Dallas Austin was very close to George Clinton. He calls him Uncle George. So I wanted to get some of that funk. And the reason I called it Virgo was because, back in the late ’70s and early ’80s, everybody was really heavy into star signs. So I figured, since I’m a Virgo, I’d call myself Virgo Blacktro. And the studio I recorded it in was called the Movie Disco, but I thought it fit because I’m a really heavy John Carpenter fan, the way he scored his movies, and I’m heavy into Giorgio Moroder, who scored a lot of disco movie soundtracks in the ’80s. So I wanted my album to have a real movie disco feel to it.”

Just as the album’s barrage of two-minute tracks doesn’t indulge too thoroughly in any given style or tune, Stallings says he wanted the disc’s characters to be a backdrop.

“It’s sort of like my Grease or Rocky Horror Picture Show. I have to have a theme so I can have something to look forward to. I like stories and I like my comics and I’m a movie fanatic. So I like to do my own little mini-themes with characters and stuff. But concept is too serious of a word—‘theme’ is the perfect description. And I didn’t have so many people involved like I did on my other albums, so it’s a personal album.”

With Eddy Jasmin and Jordan Dare at SAT
tonight, Thursday, Nov. 1, 10 p.m., $30