Invisible Conga People keeping us in the after after dark
Words Kev Kharas
Italians Do It Better are rolling out of 2007. After helping The Chromatics and Glass Candy revive Italo-disco’s sticky hide with a clutch of fine releases, the New Jersey label have decided where to head next and, unsurprisingly, label boss Mike Simonetti isn’t ready to go home just yet.
So, Eric Tsai and Justin Simon arrive on the scene with their implausibly named Invisible Conga People.
“I’d rather not go into why the name seemed appropriate to me,” counters Simon, who, at 31, is a year younger than his partner. “I don’t want to influence anyone else’s interpretation.”
Fair enough. My interpretation runs thus: if Italians Do It Better’s After Dark compilation was the perfect score to emptying clubland streets, Invisible Conga People soundtrack what happens after after dark. While Simon thinks his new label mates are writing “good stuff”, his band defy the disco aesthetic and owe more to Cluster’s desolate krautrock.
“I like that people have a hard time describing what we sound like,” claims Simon. “Not because it’s ‘difficult’ music, but because it’s our own.”
In truth, it’s probably both. Debut 12” ‘Weird Pains’/’Cable Dazed’ flutters and flinches through puddles of leaked serotonin and other remnants of small-hour decadence en route to the “dream rehearsal space” that spawned it. Here, in a basement under an art gallery on Manhattan’s west side, Tsai and Simon lose themselves in a jungle of gear that takes 40 minutes to plug in and a confusing hum that gave ‘Cable Dazed’ its name.
The upside of the instrumentation is the pair “feel like we’re actually playing the equipment”. The downside? Touring, for now, is impossible. Trapped in their basement, with that name and a refusal to “hop up and down and wave my hands in the air like a stooge” at parties, Invisible Conga People are starting to come across like a pair of asocial recluses.
Not so, insists Simon.
“There’s just something in me that’s more often drawn to long, hypnotic pieces that take time to reveal themselves,” he says. “I really enjoy that element of discovery in the songwriting process - when you’re kind of feeling your way around in the dark.”
Invisible Conga People have certainly taken a while to feel their way out of that dark - their debut 12” has just arrived from the SoHo witching hours, half a decade after the band formed in 2003.
Disappearance notwithstanding, their patience and ours should prove to be a virtue.
