Patrick Cowley

Ashley_Pomeroy, Jul 22, 2005

Patrick Cowley was one of the artists who bridged the gap between disco and the hi-NRG sound of the mid-80s; he wasn't quite a pioneer of modern electronic dance music, instead occupying a similar off-to-one-side spot as Giorgio Moroder, Jan Hammer, Harold Faltermeyer and the like. His style is essentially derivative of Moroder, although he has left behind a number of classic disco singles, including 'Do You Wanna Funk', 'Menergy' and his voluminous remix of Donna Summer's 'I Feel Love'. He was also a talented synth keyboardist, and is part of a generation of early electronic musicians - again, just like Hammer, Moroder, and so forth - who grew up at a time when synthesisers were generally seen in the forbidding, academic context of experimental music, and who took the tools of Stockhausen etc and used them to make people dance.

Listened to in 2005, his music had dated, but in a generally good way; the production uses a lot of analogue synthesisers and real drums, and consequently it doesn't sound as thin and weedy as pop-dance singles from later in the decade ('Menergy' has an unimpressive 'robot voice' effect but otherwise swoops and swooshes in the classic style, and has a wonderful soaring disco diva vocal). Indeed, he was an early exponent of the kind of 'big production' that became mainstream in rock music during the 80s, but instead applied to synthesisers.

He was big in gay disco circles, didn't really cross over into the mainstream, and is a cult figure nowadays.

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