- Of all the lost-and-found delights on James Murphy and Pat Mahoney's deftly disco Fabriclive 36, it was the bookends that stole the show. Opening and closing the mix was an epic medley from Peter Gordon and his Love of Life Orchestra called "Beginning of the Heartbreak / Don't Don't" that the DFA crew had neatly cleaved in two, letting a riot of glitzed disco jewels spill out in the middle. The label now has a retrospective album for Gordon in the works, and as a preliminary glimpse, the late '70s medley now gets its very own 12-inch in a revamped version spit-polished to life again by Gordon himself.
"Another Heartbreak / Don't Don't Redux" gets its action extended by over three minutes, trading on its distinctly orchestral sensibility. So go ahead and revel even longer in "Heartbreak"'s emotive strains—the guitar scratches that pulse in time, the sustained piano chords. Fortunately things have been left largely intact: Rather than fixing what ain't broke, Gordon dusts the track off by adding synth blasts and an inspired new take on the track's distinctive sax wail, which careens between blush-red romance and searing skronk spray.
"Another Heartbreak" is a compelling document of the late '70s New York music scene, featuring not only Gordon's Love of Life Orchestra but crucial players David Byrne and Arto Lindsay doing guitars. For the medley's second half the "redux" means "Don't Don't"'s thumping disco groove has been recorded wholly anew, sampling the original's awesomely saccharine barbershop vocals.
An unreleased gem from Gordon appears on the flip, belonging to the same downtown New York universe but sounding a million miles away—far from the vibrant disco of the Loft and the Paradise Garage. Together with Arthur Russell and New York Dolls singer David Johannsen, Gordon welds dense and dubby electro clutter to the sort of goofy nonsense lyric, "rhat hat...stays on!" that should be familiar to any Russell fan. It's a kind of downtown counterpart to interstellar NY boom-bap like Rammellzee's "Beat Bop." Supposedly the tune's a lost nugget to Gordon's award-winning score for a dance performance of the time—one can only imagine a troupe of graffiti-covered robots, pirouetting in the urban jungle.
Tracklist A Another Heartbreak
A1 Don't Don't Redux
B That Hat