RECORD TURNOVER 80s HITS #235
Last weekend I played a track by Soma Holiday to dance floor and people loved it. At that time I actually didn’t know it was first released in 1984. Soma Holiday was a Brooklyn-based duo formed by Jean-Marc Vallod from France and American vocalist Jane Honicker. They met in Williamsburg in the early 1980s after Vallod had left Marie et les Garcons.
Their only recorded output was for a long while the ”Shake Your Molecules (The Neutron Dance)” 12” that came out on in 1984 on the small Cachalot label. It was also given a release in France via Les disques du soleil et de l’acier. Remarkably, there’s also a video for the a-side, which you can watch below.
In recent years, collectors of 80s dance music picked up on the record and in 2014 (on its 30th anniversary) Minimal Wave reissued a remastered version. It was augmented by a dub version of the a-side as well as the unreleased version of the b-side and one unreleased track. These were from a 1984 recording session at Unique Studios on Manhattan. Apparently, there’s more unreleased material because discogs also lists a bootleg tape from 1997 called Retrospective 83-94. I sure hope these will resurface officially at some point.
