Disco Inferno - Lost In Fog

Disco Inferno - "Lost In Fog"

I can't remember when I first heard of Disco Inferno, though I'm almost positive that I "discovered" them on a blog or a message board online. I was still in college, so it must have been in 2000 or 2001, a few years before DFA, Fluxblog, and the greater postmillennial discussion of rockism had completely resurrected disco to relevant status, at least among the hipster cognoscentes. Needless to say, I was confused, maybe even initially put off by the name, mental images of Saturday Night Fever immediately clashing with whatever complex descriptors and reference points were being tossed around to describe their sound. If their name caused so much brow-furrowing in 2000 (half a decade after the band split up), I can't imagine what anyone in the early 90s must have thought about it.

Nothing in particular lead me to "Lost In Fog" before any other Disco Inferno songs. It was probably obtained from a series of fruitless Napster searches that yielded hundreds of results for The Trammps, but practically none for the Essex trio. It's telling that my "copy" of "Lost In Fog" was originally taken from a Virgin Records ambient compilation, and not from the group's own 1994 EP, It's A Kid's World; if anyone in America actually possessed any of their CDs at the time, they certainly weren't bothering to share them with others. This would be a minor inconvenience at the time, given the eventual compilation and dissemination of The Five EPs from ILM to the rest of the internet, and the reissue of D.I. Go Pop and Technicolour in 2004. But it would be enough to convince me that D.I. were surely an experimental band like Seefeel or Analogue, and this track was surely a sign of what I could expect from them. Predictably, the converse was true, and "Lost In Fog" was the furthest excursion from traditional songwriting that the band would ever take.