Oh those summer nights!

One of the strangest beginnings of a dance hit - a raucous, aggressive invitation that sounds more like a battle cry, but which invite you in it does. It will always remind me of clubbing as a student amidst too much strobe lighting and dancing until I could dance no more in a haze of vodka & coke (yuk!), other people’s cigarette smoke (a sensation I definitely do not miss!), and decibel level that left your ears ringing long after you went to bed. Those were the days…

How do they do that?

There are many aspects of this piece that are common to all dance music and which give it that hypnotic or trance-like infusion. But there is a particular feature of this dance number that, for me, makes it more interesting than others of this genre. It is a song, in that it has lyrics and a vocal part, yet the ‘singer’ never sings. All of the melody is in the instrumental parts. The lyrics are shouted, sometimes at close range, sometimes with an echo, others from what seems a great distance away. This gives an edge to what might otherwise have been a jaunty, but perhaps inconsequential tune on the keyboard. The recurring lyric when translated is ‘listen’ and even though we might not have known that was what was being shouted at us, the effect is most definitely to grab our attention and make us do just that!

Hope you enjoy it or feel inspired to listen to something new today.

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