Patrick Cowley - Hard Ware - VINYL LP

Cybernetic disco maestro Patrick Cowley graces Dark Entries once again with Hard Ware, an LP of far-out funk and synthpop celebrating what would have been Cowley's 75th birthday. Best known for his chart-topping disco anthems, Cowley left us with an incredible body of work before his tragic death in 1982 due to AIDS-related illness. Since 2009, Dark Entries has been working with Cowley's friends and family to uncover the singular artist's lesser-known sides, including his soundtracks for gay pornographic films, which the tag chronicled on compilation albums School Daze, Muscle Up, and Afternooners. Hard Ware presents the closing chapter in a trilogy of unreleased Cowley dancefloor bangers that began with 2022's heavy-hitting Male Box and was continued with the soul and garage-inflected From Behind in 2024. The most expansive in said trilogy, Hard Ware delivers ten tracks of pure, uncut Cowley sultry, psychedelic, sarcastic, and just a bit sleazy. Cowley devotees will delight in InchTech-No,Inch a sparse instrumental demo version of his epically dystopian InchTech-No-Logical World.Inch You could soundtrack your next aerobics session with cheeky numbers like InchPajama Party MassacreInch or InchShake It Up,Inch both of which feature Cowley himself on vocals. The frenetic InchBig Ass in MotionInch is built around samples from Rudy Ray Moore and The Madam's infamous InchSensuous Black Woman,Inch an X-rated comedy record that would later feature in classic booty house records. Mid-tempo cosmic groovers are well-represented with jams like InchHellfireInch and InchMegablue,Inch which perfectly capture Cowley's bathhouse-in-outerspace sensibilities. No collection of Cowley's work would be complete without an interstellar floor-filler, and we've got quite a few here, like InchJungle Jump,Inch which pits whirling beats with dub-laced swirls of synth, or InchSpellbinding Love