Disco Hospital Books & Records is an imprint founded by Andrew Zealley. The imprint currently publishes work by Zealley in audio, print, and video formats, with an ear to future publications by other artists. Audio publications are mostly limited to vinyl phonograph format, with select digital exceptions.
Why “Disco Hospital”?
Getting to the so-called brass tacks, Disco Hospital is titled after a specific reference: the opening, instrumental track on the album, Love’s Secret Domain (Torso Records, 1991), by Coil — renowned for what David Keenan describes as an, “alchemical cocktail of futurist noise and altered states.” In Disco Hospital irony is exchanged with degrees of sincerity that are possible only under the harshest conditions. Representational of London’s queer community at the height of the pre-cocktail HIV/AIDS pandemic, Coil’s recording evoked a dis-eased synthesis of both the party and the problematic, and became synonymous with the medicalized state of affairs for urban gay men globally. Included in the soundtrack to Derek Jarman’s final feature film, Blue (1994), Coil’s “Disco Hospital” is both significant and concise as a reading of the situation and the seminal HIV/AIDS activism of that era. It is also deeply personal, as is the content of this larger project at hand. Both reflect identities, bodies, and subjectivities from activist perspectives. As Christopher Nealon writes, “the ‘subjecthood’ of social movements [...] generate very mobile and responsive kinds of collectivity to meet assault and crisis.”
Zealley’s conjuration of Disco Hospital in the current milieu—a queer constellation comprised of AIDS industry, PrEP, U=U, queer liberation theory, intergenerational exploration, increasingly homophobic violence and criminalization of queer lives, pleasures, and sexualized substance use—is an attempt to reinvigorate public discourse and practices of listening and knowing. Phonograph records on the Disco Hospital imprint are understood as moving pieces, in the hands of DJs and music selectors, that can do/take the work in/to queer socio-sexual and socio-sonic times and spaces.
Andrew Zealley first used Disco Hospital in relation to his MFA studies and thesis. This included both the research and outputs, including a series of artist bookworks in chapbook format. Following, he put the term to work in umbrella ways to advance and gather work (audio, text, video) about risk, queer sex and pleasure, and sexualized substance use. His doctorate work, Risky Beeswax: Artistic Responses to the Biopolitics of HIV/AIDS, explores risk in relation to art and sex, both historically and in the current era of AIDS industry. The audio intervention for Risky Beeswax is a 2LP vinyl phonograph set, Soft Subversions (Disco Hospital Books & Records, PNPLP-01, 2021).