George Duke
Faces In Reflection

Eros’ Go For It is a fearlessly original take on Paradise Garage disco, mixed in a way that feels equally Mad Professor and Walter Gibbons.The story of Eros begins in a high school in Vauxhall, New Jersey in the mid 70s when four kids began a friendship based around their mutual love of soul, funk, rock, disco, and bands like Earth, Wind & Fire and Funkadelic. Assanouan G’Bado, Fletcher Gaines, Bobby Jones and Mike Freeman started off jamming after school, playing occasional gigs in New York and honing in on an original sound. When the group graduated, Assanouan and Bobby went off to the service and Fletcher went to university.Eros reunited in the late 70’s and began taking things more seriously, producing a set of songs with the intention of getting a deal with Motown. The morning after recording a full album’s worth of material, the group flew to Detroit hoping to sign a record deal. The legendary label was interested in the songs, but made them an offer that didn’t feel right for the group. The songs were shelved and Fletcher and Bobby moved on to new ventures.Mike and Assanouan pursued a self-released single on their own DAP records, reinterpreting two of their Motown demos with drum machines and overdubs to fill in for their two missing bandmates. Go For It was their individual take on disco, and the new 1985 remake took the AOR-oriented demo version, and transformed it into a transcendent dance floor illusion, that, in an alternate universe, would have turned dancers at the Paradise Garage upside down. Similar to Stephen Encinas’ un-classic, the song mutates deftly at the half-way point, opening up into a stripped-down and dubbed-out denouement, adorned in cascading electronics and the soaring vocals of Barbara Green.Go For It is the first of two releases from Eros on Mixed Signals, and pairs the group’s expanded electronic remake with the original Motown version, rescued from the last surviving demo cassette.

Released in 1979, self-financed by loans from friends and allies, Mandinka Dong - The Mandinke Dance - is the genesis of Touré Kunda, the cornerstone of the band’s unique sound, at the crossroads of Disco, Funk, Pop, Reggae, Portuguese, Guinean, Cuban, Zairean, Mandinke and Soninke music.