Justine & The Victorian Punks - Beautiful Dreamer

Born in Tunisia, raised in France, based in New York City, the artistColette has worked in various media film, photography, paint andperformance but her greatest conceptual piece is her own life. Overthe past four decades she has lived out a narrative of her own creation,one in which she has assumed various personas, guises and identities.Her first rebirth happened in 1978, when she pronounced herself dead,held her funeral at the Mudd Club, and was resurrected as Justine.Working with avant-garde pop pioneer Peter Gordon and his Love ofLife Orchestra under the nom de plume Justine and the VictorianPunks, she recorded the Beautiful Dreamer / Still You 12-inch anddubbed the music disco-punk. While the term seemed contradictoryat the time, it serves in hindsight as proof of Colette s and Gordon srightful place within the future-gazing avant-garde. Beautiful Dreamer, the soundtrack for the installation seriesof the same name, opens with the soft lullaby of a music box, andtransforms into a mid-tempo disco beat beneath Colette s doe-eyedutterances. Gordon s arrangement progressively heightens the track sintensity, culminating in his wailing saxophone juxtaposed against alilting choral backing provided by vocalist Shelley Hirsch. Flipside Still You is a romanticized cover version of Lucio Battisti s AncoraTu. Front-and-center here are Colette s spoken word vocals, firstin conversation with Gordon portraying a male lover and, later, dewilyrepeating, Leaving you is just impossible. The single, with itsseductive bassline, fully encapsulates the sultry feeling of what mightbe described as night music. Engineered by Jay Burnett, who would go on to record AfrikaBambaataa & the Soul Sonic Force s seminal proto-hip-hop classic Planet Rock, these two songs were, incredibly, recorded in a singlenight at Electric Lady Studios. Some 30-odd years after their originalrelease, they sound as compelling and entrancing as ever. Colette andGordon, then as now, continue to make art ahead of its time.

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