Another Two Techno Records That Sound Unbelievably Similar

B.D.I. ‎– City & Industry (2009)

B.D.I. is pretty elusive and there is very little information out there on the web about this producer, only that they are a he. They havent put anything out since 2012, at least under the B.D.I. moniker.

I first heard this record on an Andrew Weatherall and Ivan Smagghe mix at the Sub Club, Glasgow from 2010 and just loved how different it sounded as it entered the mix.

Released from The Netherlands in 2009 on Rush Hour Recordings this tune certainly does live up to its title, at least to my imaginings, conjuring up images of heavy industries working away through thick plumes of smoke, pistons pumping and sheets of steel being slammed through molten furnaces. To me its a perfect theme to this type of imagery as it chugs on increasing in energy for seven and a half minutes. One thing's for sure, this record was quite different to most of the other stuff in it's genre at the time of its release and seemed to be genuinely original. I specifically remember thinking this back in 2010 when I first heard it, but alas, on digging a little deeper things are rarely what they seem...

Dany Marchetti - Antenna Share (????)

OK, so this seems to be one hell of a mystery here potentially born out of miss-labelling and other mixups. If you go to the Dany Marchetti page on discogs.com you'll see at the top of the list of his releases an album called Vol 2 (LP), released in 1978. Click on this and you can listen to only one track from the album called J.J. Ben Song. This tune is pretty much what you would expect based on the discogs genre description of 'Disco, Jazz-Funk, Electro, Easy Listening' and shouldn't really raise any eyebrows.

Now let's look at Vol 1 (LP), the second album in the listing, and in particular the second from last track on side B titled Antenna Share is the one we are most interested in. This record doesn't have a release date so if Vol 2 was released in 1978 then it's not too crazy to assume that this was probably released sometime in the late 70s also. If you skip through the limited amount of tunes uploaded on YouTube from this album you can see that most are of the 'Disco, Jazz-Funk, Electro, Easy Listening' genre, as listed on discogs. There are one or two exceptions to this though. One being this tune called Sky Love, which is incorrectly titled as Antenna Share on the YouTube video, and which I would describe as some form of early experimental electronic synth music.

So finally we come to the aforementioned tune Antenna Share (see video below), which prompted me to write this article. This piece of music is light years ahead of the game if truly produced in the late 70s and pretty-much forms the backbone of B.D.I.'s City & Industry.

So after taking all this information into consideration what can we really called City & Industry? A cover version? An extensive use of a sample? A mashup? Is it an actual sample beefed up with modern plugin effects, or is it a reworking? One thing I'm sure everyone will agree on is that they are essentially the same tunes.