Documentary: The Untold Story of Euro Disco

We know that modern electronic dance music came from the fusion of disco, soul and funk, resulting in American house in the 1980s. But how did music built on live instruments become synthetic? And how did it become popular in Europe? Belgian documentary The Untold Story of Euro Disco sheds some light on this. In addition to imitating overseas recordings, musicians from France, Italy, Germany and Belgium began to incorporate synthesisers into disco music. This is how they created such seventies masterpieces as Magic Fly, I Feel Love, Supernature, Moscow Discow, and others.

Finally, once avant-garde music from European centres of electroacoustic experimentation came to the mass listener, it was a straight path to fully synthesised tracks. (Italian Hi-NRG records were a hit on black American dancefloors, where proto-house was only months away). I daresay that it was the appearance of mass synthesiser music in European discos that predetermined its popularity two decades earlier than in the States.