- Eric Duncan, one-half of Gotham's sleaze-disco overlords Rub-n-Tug, turns in a full-length mix for clothing label aNYthing's imprint. It's the second Rub-n-Tug-related mix for the aNYthing crew, the first being Better With A Spoonful of Leather, an album-length dive into snail's-pace dance grooves that rivaled Houston rap in its sleepwalking, codeine-heavy slowness. How We Do in NYC, in contrast, is a mix of sweaty, energetic string and vocal-laden Philly-style disco, all tweaked and edited into shape by Duncan himself.
The man's got a slew of strong releases under various names, like his pseudonym Dr. Dunks and side projects like DFA's Still Going, and it's great fortune to have this mix see the light of day—consider it one of the closest approximations to getting the Rub-n-Tug treatment in the club firsthand: Duncan and his partner Thomas Bullock are renowned for a kind of raw-dog in-the-red mixing style that gleefully eschews perfection for passion, and this release delivers. Like a lot of killer NY underground disco these days, however, it's a rather limited-press offering. For some reason some of NY's heaviest disco hitters couldn't give a toss about career-building or conquering the sales charts. (It's no surprise that one of the scene's finest purveyors is called Whatever We Want Records.)
Full of rollicking orchestral builds and swaggering grooves, How We Do in NYC is a fire-breather from start to finish, perhaps evident from such an incineration-themed tracklist, which includes titles like "Keep a Burning" and "Fire Hungry." Duncan's oft-invisible cuts and seamless mixing demonstrate how disco's cheesy excess can be caught and packed tight into a body-moving pressure cooker. The tracks don't particularly vary from one another, but that's hardly grounds for complaint, because you don't really want them to, they roil and churn in a kind of ecstatic sweet-spot best experienced in a state of fluid overabundance.
The first half stays celebratory and boisterous, stretching out into a hairier affair on the back end, culminating in "Stone Waters," a deep rock-disco rager that sounds like the extended jam on the Rolling Stones' "Can You Hear Me Knocking" only more drummed up and drugged out. If How We Do slips through your fingers, rest assured that "Stone Waters" along with mix opener "Keep a Burnin" are also available as a 12-inch under Duncan's C.O.M.B.I. alias. But do yourself a favor and don't let this limited edition mix get away. There are some records within a particular genre that are potent enough to serve as gateway doses to the uninitiated—next time a friend professes a distaste for disco beats, spike their stereo with this and watch minds expand.
Tracklist 01. Keep a Burning
02. Dancing Fast
03. Fire Hungry
04. Let Dance
05. "Hold Me"
06. She the Ones
07. Stone Waters
08. Stop Playin'
09. Kill
10. How We Do in NYC