What Is This Thing Called Disco?

What Is This Thing Called ‘Disco’? is a landmark Australian post-punk artefact, originally released in 1981. One of the first records from the Australian underground to incor-porate disco elements into the reigning post-punk aesthetic, What Is This Thing Called ‘Disco’? sits alongside records by international counterparts Flying Lizards and Yellow Magic Orchestra in its combination of art school formalism and dancefloor hedonism.

Asphixiation was a one-off side project for Melbourne provocateur Philip Brophy, best known for his work with (pronounced with three clicks of the tongue), whose decade-long investigation into the aesthetics of punk, electronic and dance music began in the late 1970s. had already released a series of seven inch singles, and had begun to incorporate elements of disco into their minimalist rock-hewn sound, when curators at Melbourne University’s George Paton Gallery approached Brophy to present something in their space. Brophy decided to put disco into an art gallery. The ensuing exhibition presented paintings lifted from Italian Vogue, single instruments displayed on plinths, tape loops playing minimalist ambient sounds, and a synthe- sizer pulsing a loud thump throughout the space. Brophy also created a ‘fake’ disco band - itself a perverse idea because the essence of disco was its artificiality - to mime on stage with a reel-to-reel tape visibly play- ing, just like disco was being presented at the time.