Every time I see a bearded indie-rock dude or punked-out fashionista girl shaking their ass to disco, I smile and think of the musical hoops we’ve jumped through to arrive at this point in dance club history. Disco — be it new or vintage — has become enormously popular again.

A good deal of this rising interest can be traced to members of New York’s DFA Records and flagship band LCD Soundsystem. Fewer than 10 years ago, you wouldn’t have heard the words “indie” and “dance” uttered in the same sentence; today “indie dance” is used both as a descriptive and a genre name and, again, the mighty DFA have had much to do with the proliferation.
In 1997, artist/musician Pat Mahoney and engineer/musician James Murphy — the man who would co-found DFA — started to mess around with making music together. Murphy had engineered an album recorded by Rhode Island art-punk band Les Savy Fav, for whom Mahoney was the drummer, and the two had hit it off. Their experiments would lead to the formation of LCD Soundsystem, with Murphy as principal songwriter and Mahoney as drummer.

Mahoney recalls that indie kids understood the punk far more than the funk in those days, as he and Murphy were absorbing the likes of no wave band Liquid Liquid.

“They blew me away,” says Mahoney, speaking to me from a Brooklyn park while his seven-year-old son hits the playground. “James and I were really curious to see if we could make music that people would dance to. We were definitely doing time in the indie-rock ghetto and it seemed like a good place to go.”

In the early 2000s, as DFA Records developed, Murphy and friends started DJing in New York bars such as Plant Bar and APT. Mahoney was inspired to buy gear and teach himself to mix. The drummer was drawn to a lot of classic, mid- to late-’70s disco.

“The playing and the musicality on so much of it is just incredible and so free, formally,” he enthuses. “The drumming was often very stripped down and basic — minimal and yet full of feeling.”

In addition to recording and touring with LCD, Mahoney started spinning disco at clubs around New York. Two years ago, he and Murphy began to “egg each other on to play pure disco” and DJed together. This led to their mixing last year’s fantastic Fabric­live.36 CD, a collection of disco gems from past and present, featuring artists as diverse as Donald Byrd, Peter Gordon and Love of Life Orchestra, Chic, Mudd and Daniel Wang.

It’s no secret that “disco,” as a descriptive and genre, tends to rise and fall in popularity directly in relation to people’s homophobia so I was thrilled to hear Mahoney and Murphy’s bold embrace of distinctly gay-sounding disco.

“There’s this idea of ‘new disco’ and there are literally thousands of edits coming out, and some of them are really good, but what I find is that there’s a lot of disco being made for people who hate disco, which I’m not a fan of,” Mahoney states.

 “It’s been bowdlerized to a certain extent, where you take out all the embarrassing bits and make it really safe. That I find frustrating. I think there is a subtext of black gayness that permeates this music and there are still people who are really afraid of that. Dance music has a really macho element to it; if you listen to a lot of electro-house, it’s all fist pumping and, well, it’s not my kind of dance music.”

To that end, Mahoney has been bringing his “pure” disco blends to clubs and festivals — gay, straight and mixed — around the world. He and Murphy have also just launched a new DFA-related club residency in Manhattan. Called Special Disco Version, the night will run the disco gamut, from the likes of Sylvester and Arthur Russell to contemporary producers. The two will also take Special Disco Version on the road, as Mahoney will do here in T.O. while joined by DFA’s current disco don, Andy Butler of Hercules and Love Affair.

“I’ve never DJed with Andy before, and I’m thrilled that we’re doing this together,” says Mahoney. “Hercules and Love Affair is just so good as a live act and he’s a great DJ; he plays a bit harder, and more housey. It’s definitely pretty different, but complementary so I think it’s going to be really fun.”