Altered Zones

I spent a lot of my late teens fantasizing about the New York underground of the early 1980s. With the help of ZE Records, I parsed together a bygone oasis of warped dance music, scorching No Wave, and multi-racial, all-night revelry, peppered with spirited performance art and unapologetic fashion. James Chance & The Contortions, Kid Creole and The Coconuts, and Mars were the stars of the scene, but Lizzy Mercier Descloux always stood out to me most. The French born singer made deliriously off-beat dance music, performed in several underground films, and traversed the world to immerse herself in Caribbean and African music. In short, she was the type of woman that every weird girl with a soft spot for disco hopes to grow up to be. Descloux passed on in 2004, but ZE just released a compilation of her work called From Heaven With Love. “Hard-Boiled Babe,” the fourth track on the release, sounds pretty different from mutant disco classics like "Contort Yourself" and "Funky Stuff". In fact, with its compressed rhythms and slow, sultry ambiance, it sounds almost like something out of the contemporary LA beat scene. --Samantha Cornwell, Visitation Rites

MP3: Lizzy Mercier Descloux: "Hard-Boiled Babe"

From Heaven with Love comp is available for free download from ZE Records