Togas and turntables

>>Hercules & Love Affair elevates disco
to Olympic proportions

COOL HERC: Andy Butler

by JACK OATMON

Remember that scene in Spartacus where the soldier guy has a wristwatch on? It’s like that, only in Greece with turntables and zoot suits instead of wristwatches. Hercules & Love Affair is New Yorker Andy Butler’s neo-retro mash-up of numerous old-school dancefloor flavours and the many quirks of Greek mythology. His first release has just come out on sure-shot stalwart DFA Records. Not only that, but true to style, he and a few of his friends are currently ironing out a live version of the project that he says will soon be “taking classic techno songs and putting them on horns so all of a sudden it sounds like P-Funk.” Dig it.

Andy Butler: It’s quite varied. The songs are very different from one another, but they show two sides of the project. One of them is to show a live, more organic, classic-sounding disco approach. The other is a very sequenced house or techno. In a way, it’s confused people because there’s not the clearest relationship between the two. But that immediately asserts my desire to do various things rather than just one thing.

Mirror: It all kinda harkens to a certain era. The acid house thing and the Italo disco thing—

AB: Yeah, they’re on the same continuum.

M: What’s with the Greek theme?

AB: I grew up loving mythology and being a bit obsessed with it as a little kid, I guess. When I got a little older, I studied it a bit academically. Specifically things like the representation of certain homoerotic myths in Greek mythology. So I’ve always had an interest in it, which is very rooted in my childhood. As a six-year-old, for my first big birthday party, I wanted everyone to choose a Greek god to come as. So I had 25 little kids dressed in togas. There were three Zeuses! I saw pictures of it recently and thought, “Oh my gosh, I really was obsessed.” And the name has a real disco flavour. You know, such ‘n’ such and the Love Affair.

With Thomas Von Party and Davey
Lahteenmah at Zoobizarre on Friday,
Dec. 14, 10 p.m., $8