It all started in the fall of 1974... Pierre Gagnon and Jean Barbeau, two young DJs from Quebec, invested in a pair of Sony cassette decks and started experimenting with the pause buttons. Within a year the duo, guided by Pierre's drummer friend Allen Vallières who taught them musical theory, were creating primitive edits. Initially they were simply making one complete song from Parts 1 and 2 found on two sides of a 45. But as their timing improved and their imaginations wandered they began trying more complex chops; extending sections of songs, rearranging and repeating parts. One of their earliest edits made this way extended the intro to Esther Phillips "What A Difference A Day Makes" before dropping straight into the break. Sounds simple, but for its time was something of a revelation as they had no idea that DJs in New York were doing similar things on reel to reel recorders.

The trio were making edits regularly by 1976, adopting the name PAJ Disco Mix (Pierre, Allen, Jean). They were regulars at Lovers Disco Club in Laval, and when they felt their pause button edits needed to be heard they presented themselves to the DJ there. He was suitably impressed and asked if they'd make some custom edits for him, first on a couple of Andre Gagnon cuts, followed by a special Ritchie Family medley he requested to coincide with a live appearance by the band in Lovers.

Bolstered by their edits' popularity PAJ set their sights on the biggest and best club in Montreal: The Limelight. The Limelight was packed every weekend with a crowd who lapped up the music played by Robert Ouimet through the club's killer sound system. The first edits they presented to Robert: Deodato's "Peter Gunn" and "Love Bug" by Bumblebee Unlimited (the original cassette edit of which is included here), didn't seem to work due mainly to the fact they were played from cassette. But the group had already invested in Akai reel to reel tape machines, and had been taught the art of splicing by the DJ at Cosmos 2000, a 1500 capacity club in Trois-Rivi�res, 150km from Montreal. So when they returned some months later with tape edits of Silvetti's "Spring Rain" and Jesse Green's "Flip" the crowd went crazy.

They became good friends with Ouimet and created custom edits for him, some specified by him, some they just thought would work. From then things got serious. PAJ taught themselves many techniques for creating edits; wrapping tape around a record player's turntable to vary the speed, covering the erasing head with a piece of cardboard to double up pieces of music without erasing what was already there. Ouimet played their creations not only to his appreciative Limelight crowd but also on Canadian Radio where he had a weekly show. Robert would visit New York once a week to pick up records from the NY Record Pool. While he was there he would often visit Sunshine Sounds and have acetates made up of some of PAJ Disco Mix's edits, distributing them to the best DJs in the Pool.

The biggest success came when a chance meeting with Gerry Bribosia, a customer in the record store where Pierre worked as well as someone PAJ regularly met in the audio store they frequented, led to the group creating a remix for him of a song he'd produced called "Dracula Disco". The song didn't do anything sales-wise, but Gerry had another song he wanted the guys to work on: "Music" by Montreal Sound was the theme tune to Canada's biggest television disco show "Et ca Tourne" and, after PAJ Disco Mix created an edit Tom Moulton described as "Too much" the 12 inch single went on to sell ten thousand copies in Canada alone. Two weeks later it was signed to TK Disco, and went on to sell somewhere in the region of half a million copies worldwide (Though this is an estimation by a music lawyer who was called in after no royalties were paid by TK!).

Between 1976 and 1978 PAJ Disco Mix created more than fifty pioneering re-edits, mixes and medleys. A handful of Sunshine Sounds acetates have survived, but due to the nature of the format, there isn't much life left in them. Thankfully they kept everything. Right down to the early pause button edits.

We've selected what we believe to be the very best of these recordings. It's a real pleasure to present to you this piece of disco history. We hope you love it!

Click the titles below to listen to selected tracks from Volume One and Two of PAJ Disco mix.
The finished albums contain seven extended disco edits each.
The digital albums include the medleys PAJ 1000 and PAJ 2000 ...

Created in September 1976. A two part 45 inspired PAJ Disco Mix to create their own long version of this song. The late Paul Vincent was the owner of the rights of the song in Canada, he loved the PAJ Disco Mix, but could not manage to get a deal to have it included on the 12" release

Created in January 1978. PAJ Disco Mix had recently mastered the art of turntable mixing on tempo and wanted to do a project including this new knowledge. Using two tape machines, one playing a loop from Cerrone's "Look For Love", the other recording the loop as well as Pierre, Allen and Jean mixing various records in live.

Created in February 1977. Robert Ouimet loved this song but found even the LP version too short, with no 12 inches announced. PAJ Disco Mix made him this longer version featuring a lot of vocal repetitions from the very beginning of the remix. As Pierre puts it: "This is one of the more high energy remixes we did. Listen to it and dance, dance, dance, dance!"

Created in October 1976. Robert Ouimet gave PAJ Disco Mix a 45 of this song and asked for a longer remix as he he loved it. This is one of the last Cassette Deck pause edits PAJ made. The highlights of their remix are their reconstruction of the drum rolls, the multiple punches and the violin effect in the beginning of the rerfrains.