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Kebekelektrik
Kebekelektrik
Les Disques Direction - 1977
Michael Panontin
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The Italian-born Pat Deserio was just seven years old when he left the tiny village of Montelongo and landed with his family in a teeming, vibrant Montreal. It wouldn't take long for the newly arrived kid to discover his love of music, and by the early seventies, after having amassed a substantial collection of records, he began what would become a long and fruitful career as a deejay, producer and label exec. For its population, Montreal was the undisputed disco capital of North America, and by 1977 the ever-creative Deserio was starting to elbow his way onto the increasingly crowded scene there, issuing a string of funky dancefloor fillers under the names Dogs of War, Bombers and of course Kebekelektrik.
Around that same time, a young philosophy major by the name of Gino Soccio was developing a reputation as one of Montreal's hottest keyboard whizzes. Deserio invited him to help out on a new disco project that he was working on and the budding musician - still barely into his twenties - agreed. But Soccio, who cut his teeth on Kraftwerk, Stockhausen and Wendy Carlos, had never done any disco before and truth be told didn't really care much for it. He showed up at the studio and was confronted with a roomful of ARPs, Moogs and Hammonds, as well as a wooden box containing some kind of homemade drum machine. Much to his surprise, when he asked where the rest of the band was, the engineer pointed back at him and said, "You're it."
The result was the self-titled Kebekelektrik LP. Released in 1977 on the tiny Disques Direction imprint, Kebekelektrik was a virtual homage to Giorgio Moroder with its novel cache of glitzy, throbbing synthlines and proto-cosmic grooves. The savvy Deserio was always just one step ahead of the curve, beating out French pioneers Space with a version of their uber-cool 'Magic Fly' before the band themselves could release theirs in Quebec, and including a funked-up, if somewhat cheesy, rendition of Ravel's 'Bolero' a couple of years before of all those Bo Derek associations.
The sprawling 'Bolero', which occupies the whole of side one, was intended as the single. But it was the Soccio co-penned 'War Dance' that would fill the clubs. That eight-minute "orgy of analog squirts and electronic flourishes", as Wax Poetics so evocatively described it, became a hit almost overnight when DJ Robert Ouimet decided to give it a spin at Montreal's super-hip Limelight discotheque.
Kebekelektrik was a groundbreaking record. Though no one could have known at the time, it would serve as a blueprint for all those Italo-disco tracks down the road. So it's no surprise, then, that Kebekelektrik found favour in clubs outside Quebec too, with a Tom Moulton remixed version finding its way into shops in the U.S., Britain and, of course...Italy.
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