You Need To Hear Patrick Cowley’s ‘70s-Era Porn Soundtracks

Patrick Cowley is far from a household name, but his impact on pop and electronic music is one of subtlety and understatement. You see, while his contemporary Giorgio Moroder made a name for himself lacing mainstream Hollywood hits like Scarface with pumping, synth-heavy soundtracks, Cowley's soundtrack work mostly lived in the dark corners of the seediest video stores.

Despite being an early victim of the AIDS epidemic—Cowley sadly passed away in 1982 at the age of 32—his output was extensive: two albums, countless remixes, and several unreleased soundtracks for porn giants Fox Studios. It is the latter that make up the bulk of Muscle Up, a new compilation of Cowley's work for Fox, made between 1973 and 1980, that Dark Entries and Honey Soundsystem have unearthed.

The video for "Deep Inside You," premiering below, features a new edit of seven Fox films, starring countless "young, muscular, rugged, leather-clad hunks," Dark Entries' Josh Cheon told FADER over email. This inherently NSFW content has been edited down to a "PG-13," and while Cowley's soundtracks were originally altered to suit the intensity of scenes using a Variable Speed Oscillator, Cheon told FADER that this time, he slowed down the original movie footage to fit Cowley's composition. This reversal allows for Cowley's music to live center-stage, and the end result is a nostalgic odyssey of progressive disco, decades ahead of its time. Muscle Up is out October 19th.