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Olof Olsson
disco: the music, the places, the people

17.06, 7pm

The history of disco begins in the late 1960s, when David Mancuso played records to friends in his New York apartment. At that time there was of course no talk of disco. Mancuso only played what he liked and thus later influenced DJ greats like Larry Levan and Frankie Knuckles.

In his performance, Olof Olsson will go into the prehistory and development of the disco phenomenon and use audio examples to show how the sound, which later became so uniform, only slowly developed from different musical styles. In addition, he will show how disco eventually gave rise to new music genres such as house music and hip hop.

“I lost my heart to disco a few weeks after I’d become a teenager. It was a very cold night in January, 1979. I lived in small town in Sweden, where there wasn’t much entertainment. I had a transistor radio, but there was a state monopoly on broadcasting, with only two hours of pop every week. That winter night, a bit past midnight, I discovered a local pirate station. And for the first time in my life I heard songs like ‘Le Freak’ and ‘In the Bush’. It was a completely overwhelming cultural experience.” – Olof Olsson

Swedish artist Olof Olsson lives in a one-room apartment in Copenhagen together with 6000 vinyl records. He studied art at the Royal Academie of Fine Arts in Copenhagen and worked as a radio DJ. Since 2007 Olsson has been working more and more with the medium of performance.

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Thu 17 Jun 2010, 7pm

A performance to the exhibition “An einem schönen Morgen des Monats Mai…”.

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