Louie Vega and Josh Milan recorded a disco album in six weeks: 3001: A Disco Odyssey is out in January

Louie Vega and Josh Milan have completed a disco album, 3001: A Disco Odyssey, for Nervous Records. They recorded it with a wide circle of guests in just six weeks, and it comes out in January.

The musicians said so in an interview with Juno Daily.

Both are veterans of American house. Louie Vega makes up Masters At Work with Kenny Gonzalez, while Josh Milan is the voice and keys of Blaze and a four-time Grammy nominee. They first crossed paths in the early 1990s at New York’s Sound Factory Bar, where Vega was resident DJ and Milan came as a fan. Today they play together in the Elements of Life band and run the studio project 2SoulFusion.

Gospel house for a fashion show

2SoulFusion’s latest single, Shout!, began with a request from the founder of the fashion house Casablanca. He was introduced to Vega in Ibiza by the Italian DJ Joseph Capriati and explained he was planning a show built around gospel house, wanting 12 minutes of music from Vega to accompany the models. “I said, why don’t we create a whole new piece?” Vega recalls. He rang Milan straight away.

Milan took the title from church. “We shout! And shouting means either physically dancing or literally shouting to give praise,” he explains. More than 13 vocalists sang on the record, among them Lisa Fischer, Dawn Tallman, Audrey Wheeler, Ramona Dunlap, Rasan Patterson and Milan himself. The show took place in a Paris cathedral, with Luciano and Dimitri From Paris among the guests. The London House Gospel Choir sang, as did the Detroit vocal trio Dames Brown, who flew in from Ibiza for it.

“Just add soul to it”

2SoulFusion grew out of the pandemic. Vega’s engineer couldn’t get across from Brooklyn, so he rode out to Milan’s studio himself to work on some remixes. The remixes turned into originals, and Milan came up with the project’s name. They don’t pin down a genre: “Whatever genre is out there, just add soul to it, and that’s what we do.” Milan only writes positive lyrics: he once recorded a vulgar song and, in his words, didn’t like the way it made him feel.

The duo has no plans yet for live shows or an album under the 2SoulFusion name: the studio comes first. “There’s always a eureka moment, man. It’s always a high,” says Vega. On our air he can currently be heard on Gimme Some Love, recorded with Vikter Duplaix: 30 plays in the last 30 days.

In early November Louie Vega said goodbye to another veteran of American house: Cevin Fisher has died.