Long may the Lagos Disco Inferno burn, Piotr Orlov meets Frank Gossner, the blogosphere's most intrepid adventurer. For musical anthropologists and collectors of long-forgotten recorded artefacts, the 1970s singer Nana Love is a textbook case: the practically unknown yet contextually enthralling blank slate. Almost no information about this artist exists, beyond the basic facts that she was an up-and-coming performer on the Lagos, Nigeria-centred West African nightclub circuit, that she never quite achieved stardom there, but that she provided lead vocals on a number of recording sessions featuring many of the talented musicians that populated this scene. If lucky, interested parties can occasionally find copies of her one known album, 1978's Disco Documentary Full of Funk, for sale on various internet vinyl emporia for exorbitant prices.
Unlike the rest of the music industry, the market for rare vinyl records - especially those featuring raw rhythm and blues, disco and funk - has so far remained untouched by the global economic downturn. If anything, it has flourished, thanks to the vintage disco revival that club culture has experienced over the past three years. Such recordings are sought after and revered in their original form, much in contrast to the disposable Google jukebox mentality of MP3 download culture.
Hence, it is fascinating to find Love's visage staring out from the cover of a new, widely distributed CD album entitled Lagos Disco Inferno, wherein the textbook subject becomes a symbol of something much bigger, and soon, quite possibly, the star she may once have hoped to be. Lagos Disco Inferno is the work of Frank Gossner, a German DJ and crate-digger (the accepted term among those in the know for collectors of hard-to-find and unreleased vinyl) now living in Brooklyn, New York, whose exploration of African sounds has, for the last three-and-a-half years, been documented on the blog www.voodoofunk.com.
Gossner's collection lovingly curates a dozen songs recorded in and around the Nigerian capital during West African disco's mid-Seventies peak period. Love's 14-minute-long Hang On is its closing track. It is a wonderful song, though not necessarily because of its singer's vocal prowess. What makes Hang On jump is the way Love's screams and yelps ride the tune's taut rhythms and the precisely firing pistons of its brass section. It is a disco cut of the highest order, the kind that would not have seemed out of place in the glitzy dance clubs of New York, London and Paris - and could possibly even have become a hit in many of them. Like much of the great music now being reappraised thanks to the findings of Gossner and his ilk, its revitalisation is as much about these "what ifs" as the reality of "what was".
For the 43-year-old Gossner, in addition to personal interest and the slight economic opportunities offered by the rediscovering of rare music, such a reception is the primary reason why he does what he does: travelling the world to unearth buried vinyl treasures. Of the records he finds, he plays some in his own DJ sets, reissues a few and sells the others to fellow collectors. He has been hunting records since the 1990s, when - under the pseudonym DJ Soulpusher - he was one of Berlin's foremost authorities on rare US R&B and funk, plus its European progeny, French go-go pop and sexploitation-movie soundtracks. However, his tastes took an unexpected turn in the late 1990s when, while visiting a record store in Philadelphia, he came upon an album by Pax Nicholas, the Ghanaian percussionist/vocalist and former member of Fela Kuti's famed group Africa 70. This was the epiphanic moment when his vision refocused on the sub-Saharan region.
Watching the smiling, tattooed Gossner sitting in the small Brooklyn apartment he shares with his wife, scrubbing a few decades' worth of another continent's grime off a handful of records he has just received from his African contacts, one sees that what his lifestyle lacks in glamour, it makes up for intrigue. Gossner dislikes interviews, preferring to chat off the record in person. However, he later e-mails me the answers to a number of questions. "I moved to Africa [in 2005] for the explicit reason of finding records," he explains in writing a few days later. "I noticed how these things went for serious money on the market and figured it'd be worthwhile to go to the source, to get a more unfiltered impression of what's really out there. At the time, there were four international dealers and a handful of collectors for African music; and most people kept their records very hush-hush. I always put my most exciting finds onto mixes and published them on Voodoo Funk. A lot of people really got into this stuff. This motivated me to dig even deeper. In the end, I spent three full years and my entire life savings. I guess there are worse investments."
Within the music blogosphere, where Voodoo Funk made its debut post in the latter part of 2006, Gossner has earned a worldwide audience, but the site's popularity has been earned by more than the offer of free DJ mixes. Its author's stories are filled with first-hand cultural observations (such as the Beninese religious ceremonies that gave the site its name) and up-close accounts of political upheaval (like the unrest he and his wife lived through in Guinea in early 2007).
Recalling his discovery of another of Lagos Disco Inferno's stand-out moments, the funk-rock tune Dancing Machine by Tirogo, Gossner says: "[I found it] in an old warehouse in Nigeria, next to a recording studio that held an uncountable amount of records. The entire place was flooded, between three to six feet high, with records. There were wasps, termites and centipedes breeding between the stacks. Everything was very mouldy and dusty. I had caught a nasty respiratory infection at a similar place in Ghana years earlier and have ever since worn a breathing mask in extreme digging locations. Together with my headlight (electricity is scarce in West Africa) this makes for an alien-like appearance that never fails to amuse the locals."
One of Gossner's more intriguing admissions is that until his African adventure began he "absolutely hated disco". He even describes the first disco mixes featured on Voodoo Funk as being full of "shameless, sleazy boogie-cheese grenades that only a few years ago would have had me running for shelter". He then explains that, to him, Nigerian disco is distinct from its western counterparts. "As the sound of the late Seventies and early Eighties in Europe and in the US got more and more modern, the sound of Lagos was dominated by powerful horn sections, heavy drums and percussion instruments," he says.
For Gossner it helps that Lagos-based disco producers such as Emmanuel Odensui had previously defined the raw, analogue power of Afrobeat and that the musicians who played disco in Nigeria "started out in rock outfits but eventually ventured into funk and disco because of the demand of the club scene and retail market". This, he says, "also explains how the Nigerian brand of disco has so much more energy - a more urgent and sometimes rebellious feel".
Coming to disco's African incarnations from this perspective, Gossner was until recently unaware that the US and European scenes always had African roots. For those whose memory of disco is little more than John Travolta in a white-suit, the writer Vince Alleti points out in his book The Disco Files 1973-78, that Soul Makossa, a 1973 record by the Cameroonian saxophonist Manu Dibango, became a worldwide anthem largely by dint of its popularity in the discotheques of the United States and France. Moreover, playlists from DJs such as David Mancuso and Larry Levan regularly featured such Nigerian musicians as Fela Kuti and the Lafayette Afro-Rock Band.
This may seem like a strange admission from a man now so deeply immersed in this music, but it's a good one. Gossner has uncovered a vast archive of largely unsung African culture out of sheer love, not prior knowledge, and with a follow-up compilation scheduled for next year, this journey is unlikely to stop any time soon. Just as well. Many more artists still deserve to have their own Nana Love moments.
Piotr Orlov is a writer, curator and DJ living in New York.
