Muscle Up, listen up...

Transmissions from the secret history of gay porn music… October sees the release of Dark Entries’s second volume of Patrick Cowley instrumentals used as soundtrack music for gay porn films School Daze and Muscle Up (both from 1980). Taking its title from the latter film, this latest collection features 75mins of vintage electronica recorded between 1973 and 1980 and is an excellent mix of ambient and cold wave electronics, spacey weirdness and robot funk. Porno music is traditionally music of the cheapest kind, usually lifted from bargain bin library cuts, the musical equivalent to old scratchy WWII stock footage, which makes Cowley’s music all the more remarkable in this context. What’s more, much of the music here is darkly experimental – a track like Uhura from the Muscle Up collection sees Cowley mining similar ground to Throbbing Gristle and Chris Carter. My knowledge of gay porn is almost nil so I’m ever curious to know how Cowley’s music plays in these films - it’s difficult enough to imagine these instrumentals in straight porn. If you’re curious, Dark Entries are previewing the Muscle Up album on their mixcloud page, while the first Patrick Cowley collection, School Daze is still available on CD and LP at the usual places...