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And the
beat goes on

Metro Area's Morgan Geist proves that
disco is far from dead

by RAF KATIGBAK

Call Metro Area's music what you like - deep disco, minimal house, downtempo boogie. Whatever you do, don't call it electro. "We were so frustrated when the album came out, all these journalists were asking us about electro. I always saw us more as a techno project. More like the early Detroit stuff," explains Morgan Geist, one half of the Metro Area duo, over the phone from New Jersey. "That stuff was super futuristic and had all these weird, angular motifs going through it, but you could still feel the warm and organic side to it."

Last year, amidst a flurry of ironic retro-referencing new-new-wave albums, Geist and partner Darshan Jesrani released their self-titled debut full-length, inspired by the forgotten sound of the '80s - the sound of black disco. Sounding like a hybrid between the warmth of disco acts like Evelyn King and frosty German minimalist bleep, the reception was nothing short of spectacular. Soon every techno, house and electro DJ was seeking out Metro Area's signature deep groove (prompting white-hot New York label DFA to trade remix duties). When asked, Geist reveals that his obsession with disco happened completely by accident. "When I started producing, I would buy records to grab a sample or drum beat from, and one day I was like, ‘Oh, what are these old, weird pink records?' They turned out to be ['80s disco label] West End records. I listened to those and said, ‘I'm not sampling this, this is incredible!' From there it just turned into this web of exploring. I must have lucked out, my first three West End records are still my favourite."

But as the retro hype cools considerably and the '80s revival quickly becomes as limp as yesterday's fauxhawk, Geist is quick to separate himself from acts that he sees are trapped in the past. "We always had a real, earnest love for this '80s stuff. I thought a lot of other records that came out influenced by the same thing are a lot more fashion- or hype-driven. I think you can hear it if someone's honestly influenced, deeper than the superficial. That's why I was saying Metro Area was almost like a techno project. Obviously, even though there's this squiggly, monophonic keyboard line and the drums aren't 909, I think that the way we pushed it in the beginning was techno in philosophy. It's about trying to find the next recombinant form that isn't just experimenting for the sake of experimenting."

In a scene that is always looking for the next thing, and where pushing sound further on the latest technology and software has often overshadowed a good groove, Geist's philosophy remains, why mess with a good thing? "It's weird, I feel like such an old fuck, especially coming up from techno where the whole idea was to make something new. I dig for old stuff a lot, but I'm not really proud of that, I don't really want to live in the past. I think the point is that the old is still new enough for me, that it's something fresh. I've been waiting for it to run dry and it's not, which is more than I can say for a lot of the new dance music that's coming out."

With DJ Nite Dog, DJ Unknown, Jordan Dare, DJ Frigid, DJ LX Statik and DJ Tök at Neon Love at SAT, Wednesday, Dec. 31, 9pm, $25