Patrick Cowley – Mind Warp

Picked this up at a carboot sale having recognised the name from his terrific I Feel Love mix. Cowley really was fantastically talented and a HiNRG innovator every bit as influential as Moroder on the evolution of EDM. What a pity he was taken so young.

Just discovered Cowley and heard technological world..

He gave us the future of dance and damn well predicted it with that song!!

Germany had Giorgio Moroder and Kraftwerk while in America it was Patrick Cowley.

INVASION runs like a train!!! Top quality Hi-NRG stuff from 1982! A must have for the electronic music lover who likes to dig deep in the history of electronic dance music.

Interesting that each version comes on another label !

what's the best pressing ? ;)

Simply a great piece of work!! One of my all-time fav disco lps. Thanks Patrick!! If u like this I suggest u give a serious listen to Gino Soccio. Another great disco electriconica pioneer.

This album is absolutely amazing. If The Who invented rock opera with "Tommy", then Patrick Cowley's "Mind Warp" can be described as a techno opera, reflecting the fact that even if a machine does not make mistakes by itself, this does not automatically mean that the world, in which these machines reside, is a better world. It's the way how mankind is using these machines that determines if they work for or against us. There are many ways to interpret this masterpiece, this is my version.

1. "Tech-No-Logical World": we hear an almost perfect interaction between man and machine (Paul Parker's natural voice and Patrick's vocoder voice). But even technology can only function flawlessly when mankind adds logic to it, hence the dashes surrounding "No". At the end of the song, we are slightly approaching the situation in which machines are slightly begin to rule us ("communication network everywhere but the flags of doom unfurled").
2. "Invasion": a high-speed hi-NRG tune reflecting the "bigger, better, faster, more" attitude of mankind as well as the things that mankind is about to cope with.
3. "They Came At Night": an extraterrestrial / supernatural force is about to stick into the minds of humans.
4. "Mind Warp": this is what the force is doing with us. Our intelligence is altered in such a way that we are using our machines to destroy ourselves.
5. "Primitive World": this is what is left of us after the destruction. We are nothing more or less than those who never had access to technology. A tribal piece showing a turning point. We are going back to the basic foundation of human life; this is reflected by the chanting "he-ya-he-ya-hey-ya!".
6. "Mutant Man": a downtempo / chill-out piece. This expresses the fact we can change our way of thinking. We are starting to free our minds and get rid of destructive thoughts that are killing ourselves.
7. "Goin' Home": this reflects mankind has come to senses and has learned from the mistakes it made. You are kindly invited to learn from your mistakes.

At the time Patrick conceived this album, he was already in a very bad health state. With songs like "Goin' Home" and "They Came At Night", Patrick was already aware of the fact his disease could not be cured and his life on earth was about to end. He also foresaw that his disease could take a long time to be "mastered" and may even reach such a degree that we will never know how to cure it ("we're going to parts unknown"; at the moment I write this, no cure has been found yet).

It remains a very sad fact that this talented and gifted musician died at an early age of only 32 years. Only God knows how our musical spectrum would sound like if he were still alive.