Black Science Orchestra - 'Walter's Room'
No. 13 in our Top 100 Electronica Albums of the 1990s
The City of Brotherly Love has often been lost in the annals of future dance talk. But with New York City, it was the twin sun that birthed the revolution in street music that would marry R&B rhythms with lush orchestral maneuvers in the dark, helping set the stage for disco, house, urban pop and so much more — the “Philly Sound” influenced everyone from Elton John and David Bowie to Queen and the Bee Gees, culminating in 1976 with Walter Gibbon’s epic remix of Double Exposure’s ‘Ten Percent,’ a major hit and dance-floor smash, and the very first 12” vinyl single in history.
It took the mad science of a young African descent studio maestro, the UK’s Ashley Beedle, to bring it all full circle with his Black Science Orchestra sound. He had come up through London’s acid house scene, helping write X-Press 2’s rave anthem, ‘Muzik Xpress.’ But then, after hearing DJ Norman Jay soothe the radio airwaves with his deep disco curations, Beedle decided to cook up a more organic and soul-based vision, combining strains of the post-disco era with its ancestral beginnings.*
“Walter Gibbons is my hero, man,” Beedle told Muzik magazine’s Kevin Lewis, harkening back to Gibbons’ incredible remix work for New York City’s legendary Salsoul Records, connecting the twin suns of disco soul, with Philadelphia’s Gold Mind Records, and its many influential artists — such as the studio collective Mother Father Sister Brother (MFSB) and the Philly supergroup, The Trammps; Gibbons’ production prowess and DJ sensibilities, along with works by Shep Pettibone and Tom Moulton, were critical in expanding disco’s frontier, bridging disco with the post-disco future: “What he did was so spiritual. He turned songs into hymns for the dance floor.”
In that spirit, 1996’s Walter’s Room was a titular homage to Gibbons, forever one of dance music’s biggest innovators, and a DJ’s DJ, who would also show the way to a younger generation of DJs, such as Larry Levan and Frankie Knuckles, who would in turn help prototype house music. Beedle, who recognized that Gibbons’ classic remix of ‘Ten Percent’ was the “blueprint for house music,” had smart instincts, impeccable taste — and the tech savvy of a modern studio boffin. He broke out of London’s rave scene at the same time as Future Sound of London, Orbital, Andrew Weatherall and Terry Farley. Wizardry was in his bones and the groove was deep in his mind.
Farley signed Beedle and his buddies to Junior Boy’s Own Records, which would put Underworld and the Chemical Brothers on the global techno map — in 1992, Beedle, Rob Mello and John Howard kicked off the first incarnation of BSO, releasing the 12” gem ‘Where Were You?’; a manifesto of sorts, it included no less than five different spellbinding remixes of the song, each inventive in its own right. Taking Gibbons’ blueprint to heart, it was less about the signature hook, but an attitude, a way of seeing the world with a diamond for an eye — the ‘Back to Philly Mix’ reveled in orchestral strings and stabbing jazz horns glissading over a rolling dub groove; Gibbons, along with DJ Kool Herc, had drawn upon the cavernous, echoey hallucinations of dub reggae to ever-tripping effect, emanating outward.
Beedle had Barbadian ancestry, so the sounds of Jamaica and the Caribbean, which also influenced Levan (who worked with reggae rhythm masters Sly & Robbie) and the Salsoul disco sound (drawing vibes from Latin and soul music), were a natural part of Beedle’s intellect. He took all of these soul threads and reknitted them into his circuit board, weaving in melodic sparks of acid bliss and delirious xylophonic hoops on the magical ‘Acid’ mixes of ‘Where Were You?’ Samples of The Trammps’ sultry strings from 1977’s ‘The Night the Lights Went Out’ scaled aural Himalayas. Beedle’s true genius was in recasting this retro aura inside a futuristic dub space — with just the right touch. Walter’s Room brought all of these elements and histories together, constructed in timeless relief — a deep, deep meditation on life-affirming music.
“Black Science Orchestra actually started with Norman Jay,” Beedle explained to Lewis. “During the pre-legal Kiss FM days, back in 1989 or 1990, Norman used to do this radio show on Saturday afternoons,” he reminisced, calling back to the early days of acid house, when rare groove and disco were bridged by more veteran DJs like Jay. “One day, he played a track called 'Where Were You (When The Lights Went Out)?' by The Trammps. It blew me away. It was all about a huge power cut in New York City when the whole city went down and they were singing stuff like, ‘Where were you when the lights went out? You were makin' love!’ It was just the maddest record.”
Beedle’s own life journey had begun in Hemel Hempstead, northwest of London, imbibing both the softer quieter environs of his post-World War II boosted hometown and diving into dub and sound system culture in the big city. After his father bought him two Citronics turntables, his DJ journey kicked into full motion in his teens. He soon set up his own sound system and DJ collective, named Shock. It was that precocious start and then headlong dive into London’s music world that would diversify his worldview and instincts for his long, broadminded, lively career.
“The sound system is a learning process,” he told Damian Harris for DJ Magazine in 1994. “It is a school, you go there and learn how to select, learn how to rock a crowd basically, and that’s carried on to what I do now. You’ve got to be able to read your crowd.” It was a process he took with him into every DJ set, production, remix and partnership. He recorded under a dizzying number of guises. There were the big breakbeat-heavy jams of his band, the Ballistic Brothers vs. the Eccentric Afro’s, Volume 1 and Volume 2 early entrants into the trip hop and chill out movements, groove-machine outfits Delta House of Funk and The Disco Evangelists, and progressive house disco warriors X-Press 2, all channelling into his soulful, psychedelic, retro-futuro sound as the eclectic Black Science Orchestra.**
The “Orchestra” part was no misnomer. While Beedle himself was a kind of renaissance man of acid house — orchestrating its past, present, and future from Shock onward, a one-man army in a way of London’s underground — one of his greatest skills was teaming up with and working with others. He was a leader, connecting the dots and the people, either through his label, Black Sunshine, sensations like X-Press 2, or more idiosyncratic projects, like BSO, recruiting musicians, co-producers and friends Uschi Classen and Marc Woolford.
“You’ve got to push the barriers all the time,” he told Harris, explaining how his preference for collaboration came about by discovering that teamwork was greater than the sum of any individual parts. “House music belongs to technology. I’ve found that working with live bands. Human interaction when making music is so much more pleasurable, it’s really warm but house music is a bit more conveyor belt music by numbers. I do feel too many records are made sitting down and saying, ‘right let’s make a record like Junior Vasquez.’ I make records for him, not to sound like him.”
The first BSO incarnation in 1992, yielding the superlative ‘Where Were You?,’ reconfigured in 1993 into a new trio with John Howard and Lindsay Edwards for Strong, a two-part single that worked off a euphoric piano line, before settling into its Beedle-Classen-Woolford formation. The German-born Classen was a formidable DJ and producer in her own right and worked with Beedle on other projects like The East Village Loft Society, The Uschi Classen Band, and The Ballistic Brothers. Woolford, a rhythm-obsessed DJ and engineer, who worked on Coco, Steel & Lovebomb’s UK house smash, Feel It, was the third essential member, who would later work with Beedle as Dynamic Shadows and Black Jazz Chronicles on 1998’s excellent and underrated album Future Juju. Their first release, 1994’s The Altered States E.P., blasted off with Salsoul horns of ‘Philadelphia’ and the howling grooves of ‘New Jersey Deep.’ So gathering together in 1995, they embarked on Walter’s Room.
‘Start the Dancer’ smoldered with anticipation of a “great time tonight,” a perfect opener strutting in the low-end while spiritualist chants and gasps set the tone for the smooth psychedelia of ‘City of Brotherly Love,’ and beyond. ‘A Hot Family Day’ bangs to congas and bongos, cruising to salsa Salsoul flourishes. ‘Bless the Darkness’ goes deeper, the tribal trip submersing the head and the hips in the hypnotism of Afrofunk rhythms worthy of Fela Kuti. Collaborating again as a unit with Classen and Woolford — who co-wrote much of the album — Beedle carves one sexy groove after another: Classen, who lends her ethereal notes just so, makes the upper reaches of Walter’s Room flow from open windows to tip toes; and Woolford’s acid jazz programming guides on river-winding ‘Rican Opus 9’ and digging delight ‘St. Mark’s Square.’
What separates Walter’s Room is its effortless complexity which is another way of saying it is rich with sounds and subtle shifts — from clever samples to meticulous keyboards — and yet goes down like chocolate milk. It’s that soft breeze in the storm. ‘Just Holdin’ On’ stomps along a Harlem sidewalk with happy scats and horns, and yet its bouncing bass line hops and winds through the trees and lamp posts like a freaky jazz cat; ‘Save Us (The Jam)’ sounds like Vangelis doing a ghost dance with Charlie “Bird” Parker, filtering through zones of nocturnal ecstasy; and ‘Downtime Science’ struts like disco on the discs of Saturn, turning and turning in disco rapture.
“First and foremost, it’s a fun album,” Beedle offered Muzik on the eve of its release. “I’m not going to say that it’s a serious musical statement because I don’t think it is. I want it to be an album people make love to, an album people put on when they drive to their weekender.” Circling the present back to the timeless, he continued. “To me, it’s trying to evoke the times when you were young and innocent and you didn’t really have a care. I just want people to put it on and love it for what it is.”
“Too much music is being made just for the sake of the trainspotter potential,” he noted, remarking how BSO’s earliest releases did better with American DJs, before more fickle UK DJs caught on. “Walter's Room is fun, man, it’s for going out to. It’s the Saturday night groove. It’s putting your clothes on in front of the mirror, practicing a few steps and then fucking off down the club. That’s what it’s about.” Aware and in fact celebrating its commercial limitations, BSO were “all in” with indie JBO.
“As far as I'm concerned, I’ve put my heart, my soul, my blood and a lot of sleepless nights into making this album,” he said. “I cried when I finished making it. I think it is a brilliant album. If anyone can stand up and tell me it's not then they either haven’t got ears or they’re lying. Maybe a lot of people won't get it, who knows? But albums like this need to be made.” A man of diverse tastes, from The Trammps to Led Zeppelin, from Joni Mitchell to Underground Resistance, his favorite film, Apocalypse Now, Beedle knew that by stepping outside of time that BSO was ahead of its time.
(About a decade after its release, JBO reissued BSO’s masterpiece with a deluxe edition that included their mighty ‘New Jersey Deep,’ built on the stepping bass of Wood, Brass & Steel’s 1976 classic, ‘Funkanova.’ It also featured Beedle’s incredible ‘Disco Throwback Remix’ of ‘Save Us,’ showcasing his funky feather-footed magic. A bonus disc included BSO’s fervent ‘Mississippi Black Sunday Remix’ of Native Soul’s ‘A New Day’ and Beedle’s gorgeous re-edit of Patti Jo’s classic, ‘Make Me Believe In You,’ a Curtis Mayfield rarity. From his trippy tribal remix of A Guy Called Gerald’s ‘Humanity’ to his afro-futuristic Afrikans On Marz remix of Femi Kuti’s ‘Beng Beng Beng’ to his morphing brilliant rework of School of Thought’s ‘Drift Apart,’ Beedle’s a creative chameleon that keeps on dispensing the most serious of disco love medicines.)
In 1996, JBO Records’ roster was on fire. The Chems moved onto Virgin the year before; Underworld stuck with JBO and were the toast of the British film industry with their Trainspotting contributions, while hitting the States with the Chems that year at the historic Organic ‘96 music festival. The disco sonics of BSO were out of step with that brief overground moment. Perhaps their UK “American” tenor was too disco for radio satellites tethered to grunge and gangsta rap. Besides, BSO wasn’t aiming for the U.S. mainstream at all, but the larger wider world of dance fevers.***
It would take Daft Punk’s poppier sound with 1997’s Homework and then 2001’s glistening Discovery, to punch house music into the suburbs. (Few realize just how much Beedle influenced them — a shoutout to the dub disco healer appeared on the album’s ‘Teachers’ roll call.) In that moment, it was the rowdier side of the city streets perhaps, the hip hop and punk attitudes blazing through the explosive breakbeats of The Chems, Underworld and The Prodigy, that caught the attention of the masses. Beedle’s sights were set on a different and far more intimate universe.
Which is to say Walter’s Room sneaked below the surface. Most people missed it, even discerning electro hounds of the time. And yet it still sounds like a zillion dollars. It’s one of the loveliest dance records ever created: Beedle, the self-described “dead-ass soul boy,” outdid his hero Gibbons, and he did it with integrity.
As the vocals on BSO’s ‘Where Were You?’ coo, for those who were there, and those yet to take the deep groove — “Ooo, I’m in heaven!” — Beedle’s room was without a doubt the disco resurrection, and its even brighter reflection.
Track Listing - 2008 reissue:
1. Start the Dancer
2. City of Brotherly Love
3. A Hot Family Day
4. Bless the Darkness
5. Just Holdin’ On
6. Hudson River High
7. St. Mark’s Square
8. Save Us (The Jam)
9. Downtime Science
10. Rican Opus 9
11. Hudson River Revisited
12. New Jersey Deep
13. Save Us (Ashley Beedle’s Disco Throwback Remix)
Track Listing - Bonus:
1. Save Us (Funky Music)
2. Heavy Gospel Morning
3. Where Were You?
4. Philadelphia
5. New Jersey Deep (Swag’s Tapehead Edit)
6. A New Day (The Black Science Mississippi Black Sunday Remix)
7. Deep Sensation (The Black Science Jump St. Remix)
8. To Be In Love (Black Science Swingtime Mastadub)
9. Make Me Believe In You (Ashley Beedle & Phil Asher Re-Edit)
*Sitting down with the trend-caller Andy Pemberton in 1993, Beedle reminisced about X-Press 2’s breakout hit, ‘Muzik Xpress,’ which was produced before he developed full command of the production process and was a lark of sorts.
“‘Muzik Xpress’ was a joke in a way,” he told Pemberton. “I hated it at the time. I thought it sounded so unprofessional, so crap. I didn’t hear it out for ages. When I did eventually hear it, I thought ‘My God, who’s this?’ Then I realized it was my own bloody record.” And of course, the record set London on fire.
The trio of Beedle, Rocky (Darren Rock) and Diesel (Darren House), told a rather hilarious story of how their first hit, which spawned a distorted ‘aggro house’ sound and genre, suffered from a bonkers engineer who ended up getting his studio repossessed. Their second hit, ‘London X-Press,’ kept up the lo-fi aesthetic.
“There’s definitely a hooligan element in our music,” Beedle admitted. Perhaps most famous is the band’s 2002 hit collaboration with David Byrne — ‘Lazy’ — which maintains the Beedle theme of serious fun.
**The Disco Evangelists’ had a major hit with ‘De Niro,’ which was an homage to the actor Robert De Niro as well as Francis Ford Coppola films like Apocalypse Now — its epic groove and strings mixed with samples of “Huey” helicopter blades, and a more melancholic ‘Choirs in Vietnam (Reprise).’
David Holmes, part of The Disco Evangelists trio, would continue to make serious waves as Exploding Plastic Inevitable, including his classic tribal trance ‘Capitão Do Asfalto (Exploding Plastic Inevitable Mix),’ a remix of Bill Laswell’s Bahia Black project on Axiom. He would of course also make the memorable trip hop album and breakout hit, Let’s Get Killed, in 1997, before becoming Steven Soderbergh’s composer of choice, scoring films like Out Of Sight and Oceans Eleven.
Third member, Lindsay Edwards, would also find success with his Tin Tin Out project with Darren Stokes. On a more underground tip, his Innersphere project with David Hedger would yield the Outer Works album and the Sabrettes special, ‘Let’s Go To Work,’ an Andy Weatherall standard at his Sabresonic nights.
Also, credit is due Danny Arno for his engineering, arranging and mixing work on BSO’s ‘Where Were You?’ release and for his co-writing work on the ‘Arno Acid Away’ mix, which is perhaps the most memorable and best.
***Perhaps it goes without saying, but obviously the Black roots of house and techno music was lost not only on the American mainstream, but also the British mainstream. Which is to say, as acid house caught fire in the UK, artists like Beedle worked hard to keep that cultural continuum strong while leaning into its multiracial potential.
“Maybe I’m getting a little paranoid, but there seems to be a concerted effort to squash Black music in its purist form,” Beedle averred to Muzik’s Lewis. “I support it with all my projects, even fucking X-Press 2 is a kind of Black music, and Rocky and Diesel will agree with me on that. We’re down with Black music and we’re down with the fact that club culture is built on Black music.”
“Anyone can tell me l’m prejudiced, but that’s just bollocks! I’m half-white, my wife is white, my kids are quarter-cast, my colleagues are white, but l’m down with Black music and that’s it. End of story. That’s the root of it and that’s what needs to be promoted. Why did I call my label Black Sunshine? Why did I call my group Black Science Orchestra? Why is my new label called Afro Art?”
“It’s all for a reason,” he concluded, explaining why Walter’s Room and identity and humanity and history all went together to create the almighty groove. “We need to show people where everything started."
And in terms of where everything started, the idea of “Walter’s room” was a callback to the dub-spaced and extended remixes of Walter Gibbons, and his influential DJ sets during the heyday of disco.
“‘Walter’s room’ is any place where the music and spirit of Walter Gibbons can be found,” wrote Muzik’s Lewis, associating it directly with BSO: “it’s more or less the home of disco.”
Gibbons, who was White, was deeply integrated in New York’s multicultural club scene, and like Beedle, found ways to weave and sublimate different music roots into fresh hybrids.
Last, it is important to recognize the critical role Junior Boy’s Own (JBO) has played in the history of rave. Initially a crew, then a zine, and then a music label, JBO is a major cultural force.