Danny Wang

DECLAIM TO FAME The beloved producer isn’t afraid to speak his mind.

Photograph: Courtesy of the artist

“I have a spiritual home I’ve never been to,” former New Yorker Daniel Wang, who’s spinning at Saturday 11’s edition of the massive Warm Up party, says over the phone from his current home of Berlin. “It’s the Saint.” For those not well versed in their early-’80s club trivia, he’s referring to the East Village megaclub, located in the erstwhile Fillmore East at 6th Street and Second Avenue, that was perhaps the grandest gay mecca the city has ever known.

The statement tells you a couple of things about the producer of spare, warm and charmingly primitive disco, who’s been releasing music on Ghostly International, Environ, Playhouse and his own Balihu label since 1993. First, unlike some who dabble in the sound, he’s not at all afraid to acknowledge the genre’s inherent gayness. This is the man, after all, who worked under the moniker Danny Ultra Omni, in tribute to the vogue-ballroom scene. And, while most like-minded producers search out utterly obscure disco tracks for source material, he opts to do reedits of the Village People (2007’s “He Dances All Night.”)

The second fact the statement tells you is that the man knows his disco history. Which is why, after moving to the disco mecca of NYC from his native California in the late ’80s, Wang, now 40, was less than thrilled with what he was hearing. “Going out to the clubs, and hearing the same 20 records… I mean, there’s no real need to hear First Choice’s ‘Let No Man Put Asunder’ all the time,” he laments. “Or, later, every time you would go to Body & Soul, you would hear the same Talking Heads single—that was their very limited idea of what nonblack disco sounded like. I would be shocked, and honestly, a little offended, about how little people knew about it. And hearing people call New York the dance-music center of the world, that almost turned my stomach, to be honest.”

But where most people would grudgingly accept what they were being force-fed, Wang fought back. In 1993, he started Balihu, his first release an EP featuring the now-classic “Like Some Dream (I Can’t Stop Dreaming).” Giddy, funky, a bit campy and utterly alien, it was miles away from both the accepted disco canon (à la the aforementioned First Choice) or the screaming-diva house of the day. “I think my own records are kind of strange,” he admits, “and to tell you the truth, I don’t even play them that much. They’re more like entries in a diary. Or you could see that Balihu is more like a disco fanzine than a record label, where we share ideas and funny little thoughts. It’s the opposite of something slick with no substance; it’s raw, but personal and done with a lot of humor.”

There’s something else that Saint proclamation says about Wang: He’s a guy who, while not exactly stuck in the past, has a certain admiration for the way things were done in days of yore. His releases offer screeds along the lines of “Records I abhor: anything with that stupid clackety overcompressed swing beat.” And he walks the walk. “I never work with a computer,” he says, “and I don’t even have Internet at home.” Now, that’s disco.

Daniel Wang spins atWarm Up Sat 11.

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