Larry Levan - The Final Night of Paradise Garage / 26.09.1987 ++ best sound quality скачать в хорошем качестве

Larry Levan - The Final Night of Paradise Garage / 26.09.1987 ++ best sound quality

**The Final Night at 84th King Street NYC the best DJ in Dancemusic History is on fire** Levan was deeply involved in New York nightlife before landing at the Garage: early on, he found a home in the ballroom community, and at close friend Nicky Siano's venue The Gallery, he was tasked with miscellaneous gigs like spiking the club's punch. His most pivotal job in the pre-Garage days was working the lights at the Continental Baths, where gay men unwinded with sex, disco and a swimming pool. His DJ career began the moment the bathhouse's resident DJ quit and he was asked to fill his place. His accrued experience meant he knew how to cultivate an atmosphere, and his innate Larry-ness is what made the Garage so sacred. Stories abound of Levan leaving the booth to dust off a disco ball hanging overhead, picking up the needle to play the exact same song that was just on or not playing music at all, instead opting to project Ken Russell’s body-horror flick, Altered States. Even the Garage's legendary sound system was custom-made for Levan's music. The stacked component system is said to have achieved both massive loudness and shimmering clarity. On The Final Nights Of Paradise, Levan is immortalised as sonic commander in chief. The mix compilation doubles as a sketchbook of a canon that remains largely embedded in dance music today. Garage classics like MFSB's old-school vogue theme "Love Is the Message" and First Choice's effusive disco hit "Doctor Love" promenade alongside jacking Chicago-born staples like Adonis' 303 masterpiece "No Way Back." If you wanted to give a brief history of club classics to someone just out of a 50-year coma, this set could serve as a terrific crash course. Then there's moments where ingenuity and impishness blur. Levan was a known prankster, and there are endless accounts of him playing the same song on repeat for half an hour or more at the Garage. The Final Nights Of Paradise features a dazzling 18-minute suite of Liz Torres' "Can't Get Enough." Levan weaves the dub into the vocal version into Torres' live performance that climaxes with the singer ranting, "You can't get it up!'' in a back-and-forth skit with an unidentified male-presenting voice. It's as though Levan took the song's title as a challenge. Can't get enough? How about now? How about ten minutes in? How about for almost 20 minutes? Levan's messy mixing aesthetic is on full display here, but there are stretches in which the mix advances without a hitch—particularly a disco-heavy section on vinyl #3, where Levan bumps things along with a series of quick, well-timed cuts. But his scrappier mixing style yields an unexpected reward, even now, almost 40 years in the future. The Final Nights Of Paradise abounds with the kinds of shocks that DePino rhapsodised. "I'm happy and I'm gay," a voice calls out as HMJ's "Hyped" bounces energetically along and then, wham! an explosion of glitter as the outro of Carl Bean’s early Pride anthem "I Was Born This Way" takes over. The mix takes an abrupt left from Loleatta Holloway's laid-back "Dreamin'" to Serious Intention's dubby proto-house "You Don't Know," rendering a wobbly but determined bridge between eras. Sometimes you can hear Levan correct his overzealousness. When Man Friday's "Real Love" comes in sloppily on top of Diana Ross' slow-burning "Once in the Morning," he quickly fades out to resolve the clatter. Elsewhere, he seems content to ride out a shaky transition—for a good two minutes, the arpeggiated synths of Chantal Curtis' "Hit Man" wiggle in and out of step with the preceding track, Harvey Mason's "Groovin' You." A rambunctious hand drum solo adds to the glorious cacophony. While the The Final Nights Of Paradise doesn't contain the full breadth of Levan's eclecticism—this was a DJ who was known to slam The Rolling Stones in the middle of a house set, after all—Levan's trademark between-track spaces do make it in. As Fingers Inc.'s "Never No More Lonely" fades out, a spacey whooshing effect fills the quiet before the optimistic piano chords on Rhythim is Rhythim's "Strings of Life" chime in. It's brief, suggesting nothing as much as a fleeting opportunity to take a breather. What sounds like an attempted live edit of Chaka Khan's "I Know You, I Live You" has clunkier results: the song plays, cuts off and then comes back in a trainwreck mismatch. (In truth, it's hard to tell which stops are Levan's and which are the compiler's. The bootlegs cover less than five hours of a three-day marathon, muddying the waters of our perception.) Levan famously wove a narrative into his song selection; it was why he was said to prefer vocal tracks to their instrumental counterparts. There's a sense of finality on songs like Adonis' "No Way Back," in which the baritone vocal whispers, "Too far gone, ain't no way back." But there's also a starburst of hope for the future. Professions of undying devotion explode from Stevie Wonder's monumental "As," fo...