‘In the beginning, disco was not descriptive of one particular, formula sound; it was where you would go to dance to all kinds of music,” says Toronto DJ Jaime Sin. “Disco is the root of all modern dance music.”
A disco fan since her high-school days, Sin has long been interested in tracing its influences and offspring. She’s a rock and rave kid who grew up ingesting heavy doses of house and hip-hop, learning more about disco and funk as she traced samples in songs she loved to their original recorded sources.
Today, Sin is on the vanguard of DJs injecting slowed tempos and eccentric electronics into T.O.’s underground club scene. She and Mikey Apples had already helped tip us off to the fact that indie-rock kids were soaking up disco vibes during the two-year run of their highly successful Shack Up weekly, where both classic- and Italo-disco were prominent in the mix. Soon after Shack Up ended in the summer of 2006, Sin was approached to do a party with local artist, promoter and DJ Will Munro.
“I was DJing at the Glass Candy, Chromatics and Crystal Castles show at The Boat in May of ’06 and I was playing a mix of all sorts of different music that I felt worked with the vibe of those bands — everything from really slow, dreamy new wave to weird punk music like Crass to sexy disco like Gina X to Italo and Roxy Music,” recalls Sin. “Will approached me and asked if I wanted to do a disco night with him, and now here we are.”
Together, the two created the Seventh Heaven Dream Disco, a free-floating party designed to showcase the sensual, shimmering sounds of disco in all its multi-hued glory. “Disco” had already become a buzzword again in New York, London and much of Europe, and a handful of local DJs were exploring it in their sets.
“I had a huge fascination with Italo disco many years ago when I was doing Peroxide,” Munro writes via email, referring to the most synth-heavy party of the Vazaleen founder’s storied past. “At that time, the going trend was more of a contemporary electro sound. So [between Peroxide and starting Seventh Heaven] it had actually been a couple of years since I’d been able to play sets of Italo and slow disco.”
“I think Seventh Heaven is a pretty logical extension of what both Will and I have done in the past,” agrees Sin. “I think that as a whole, the new disco scene is very open in terms of what people listen to and what they can play. Maybe it’s just because they’re older, but if you look at all the different DJs in that scene, it’s really across the board. You have DJs who are playing everything from The Doors to techno.”
This range is reflected in the diversity of DJs the duo has booked as guests, including local leading lights like Andy Capp, Gary Abugan and Nacho Lovers, and international new-disco heavyweights including Rotterdam’s Loud E, Berlin’s Daniel Wang, NYC’s Andy Butler of Hercules and Love Affair and London-based production maverick Maurice Fulton.
“What I really respect about those producers is that they all really follow their own feeling about the music,” says Sin. “That’s really important to me, and I want to do the same thing as a DJ. I want to share some of the feeling that I get from the songs that I love and that I feel with other people. I really love and respect idiosyncrasy.”
Sin is encouraged by the open attitudes she’s noticed among generations of clubbers now getting down to the more chilled sounds — relative to the banging blog house and distorted electro that’s dominated our dancefloors for the last two years — of disco and its myriad offshoots.
“I went to hear Pat Mahoney and James Murphy [of DFA Records] the other week and noticed there were a lot of new faces and younger kids in the crowd,” she recalls. “Those guys just played slow-BPM disco, and they totally held the attention of the crowd all night. I think that sometimes DJs are a little bit afraid to go with their own instincts.
“With Seventh Heaven, I didn’t initially have that much confidence in how it would go, but I’ve been pretty consistently surprised with the response. People can be way more open-minded than you may think.”