Over the last five years, a reconsideration of the dance-music innovator Patrick Cowley has gathered steam. Labels in Cowley’s adopted hometown of San Francisco, Dark Entries and Honey Soundsystem, have taken the lead in reintroducing the late musician, who was active for just a decade starting in the early 1970s, through a series of compilations. There was a trio of ribald dance-floor burners, an EP of theatrical curiosities made with feminist porn icon Candida Royalle, and best of all, three bulging collections of music that Cowley either scored for or refit as gay porn soundtracks. What was most astonishing: For Cowley, porn music sounded more like the queasy electronic freak-outs of Throbbing Gristle than the lush, orchestral splendor of Barry White’s Love Unlimited Orchestra.

These releases built on a legacy that, if known to listeners, was most likely associated with two grand dames of disco: Donna Summer and Sylvester. Cowley first attracted attention in 1978 with a bootleg remix of “I Feel Love,” queering the breathy paean to heterosexuality by gussying it up into a glittering beast. It drips with reverb. It sashays across the stereo field like a catwalk. It sounds like drag looks: surreal-er than real, audacious, too much. The mix is couture, stitched together by hand, and the audible seams only add to its charms. Cowley’s version is twice as long and still not long enough.

An encounter around the same time with the singer Sylvester at San Francisco’s City Disco, where Cowley was working the lights, led to a legendary, if sometimes combative, partnership. First, Cowley transformed a mid-tempo gospel number Sylvester couldn’t get right into the supernatural anthem “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real).” Then he joined Sylvester’s touring band, and together they made a brilliant album, 1979’s Stars, before falling out. But the pair reconnected in 1981, as chronicled in the excellent biography The Fabulous Sylvester: Cowley was hospitalized, dying of what wasn’t yet known to be AIDS, when Sylvester came to him and said, “Get your ass up out of bed so we can go to work.” He did, and as their friends nursed Cowley back to health, Sylvester would drive the producer to and from the studio on his moped. By 1982, they’d made one final masterpiece: “Do You Wanna Funk.” A few months later, Cowley was dead. He was 32.

But there’s more to Cowley’s story than just "You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)" and the greatest “I Feel Love” remix of all. Cowley was a trailblazer: a gay man making gay music for a gay audience and their admirers. His publishing company was named, with a wink, Masculine Music. He honed the hi-NRG style, with its staccato synth sequences that could fill the floor at gay clubs. There’s even a camp swish to his darkest recordings. But after the disco boom busted and AIDS arrived, Cowley’s work was dismissed as too sissy, too shamefully tacky.

Like Arthur Russell, Cowley’s music built new worlds of sound around disco’s thump, and played fast and loose with pop’s structures. They both were completely of their moment, yet ahead of their time. But unlike Arthur Russell, the music Cowley released while he was alive remains mostly unreissued in the kind of deluxe, canon-establishing editions they deserve. Meanwhile, his production work and remixes, both commissioned and bootlegged, are wild and wide-ranging enough to fill any DJ’s bag; while some show up on compilations or re-edit 12”s, many remain in discount Discogs seller lists. Lucky for us, Cowley’s underappreciated work is available in bits and pieces across the web. Below, a sampling of the best.

Patrick Cowley + Jorge Socarras: “Memory Fails Me”

It all began in his ears. Born in Buffalo in 1950, Cowley drummed in bands and taught himself to play keyboards while in high school. At 21, he hitchhiked to San Francisco and began studying synthesizers like “The Putney” EMS VCS 3 in Professor Gerald Mueller’s basement, also known as City College of San Francisco’s Electronic Music Lab, one of the very first of its kind in America. Cowley’s experiments paid off in some subsequent recordings made with the performance artist Jorge Socarras between 1975 and 1977, unheard but eventually released in 2009 as the album Catholic. Tracks range wildly from jittery rave-ups, ambient interludes, and Bowie-esque ballads. In this song, written and sung by Cowley himself, he beats Gary Numan at his own game. In his Oni Ayhun guise, the Knife’s Olaf Dreijer would later launch this already forward-thinking track into the 22nd century.

Michele: “Disco Dance” (Megamix)

Meanwhile, producers like Tom Moulton caught Cowley’s ear with their extended disco workouts of looped funk and soul singles. For his first released remix, from 1977, Cowley takes on a track Moulton made for Tunisian singer Chantal Sitruk. Initially, it retains much of the original’s spirit—but about seven minutes in, Cowley unleashes a menagerie of synthesized bells and whistles, sinking into a cavernous, hypnotic groove built for rooms James Murphy would later make a career gentrifying. Cowley’s epic 1979 mega-mix of Tantra’s “The Hills of Katmandu” takes things even further, with mazes of rustling synth thickets ready for dancers to lose themselves inside.

Sylvester: “Blackbird” (Live)

Nearly every song Cowley made with Sylvester was magic, particularly the gossamer, deathless ”I Need Somebody to Love Tonight.“ In concert, though, Sylvester and his multi-racial, multi-gendered, poly-sexual band, with Cowley on keyboards, stood as a raucous bridge between Sly and the Family Stone and Prince and the Revolution. Just listen to their take on the Beatles’ “Blackbird” from 1979’s outrageously underrated live album Living Proof. Sylvester makes the song’s racial subtext a parade banner held aloft by his backup singers, Izora Armstead and Martha Wash, who’d later forecast “It’s Raining Men” as the Weather Girls. All the while, Cowley deploys his technical prowess with wit, summoning flocks of chirps at Sylvester’s command, while the bandleader affectionately reads his efforts to filth. Less political but just as irresistible funk can be found in Cowley’s work for Sarah Dash, of Patti LaBelle & the Bluebelles, particularly the should-have-been-a-smash“Low Down Dirty Rhythm.”

Indoor Life: “Voodoo”

By 1980, Cowley’s old friend Jorge Socarras had started a twitchy post-punk band called Indoor Life. Cowley produced their first EP, which opens with “Voodoo,” 13 minutes of Can-ny drumming, Socarras’ uptight intonations, and great crashing waves of noise, all buoyed by the kind of bubblegum bassline New Edition and Madonna would make pop in a few years. (And speaking of pop, Cowley is said to have served up the synth fizz, uncredited, on Stacy Lattisaw’s 1982 gem “Attack of the Name Game,” a sample of which sits at the core of Mariah Carey’s “Heartbreaker.”)

Patrick Cowley: “Menergy”

Admittedly not a deep cut, but Cowley’s 1981 debut single is too seminal not to include in any celebration of his work. It remains the gayest song ever recorded, like a “Rebel Girl” for men seeking men. If “I Feel Love” is the sound of a female orgasm, then “Menergy”captures a male one; Sylvester is in the role of Donna Summer, and Cowley is Giorgio Moroder. After a bit of foreplay on the Prophet-5 synth, anatomically correct versions of Kraftwerk’s Man-Machines build and build for nearly eight minutes, until they explode. In a similar vein, Cowley’s macho productions for hunky Paul Parker, like 1983’s “Nighthawk,” flirts with the kind of sleaze Scissor Sisters would later thrust into the mainstream.

Patrick Cowley: “Get A Little”

In the summer of 1981, Cowley and Marty Blecman formed Megatone Records and released Cowley’s second album. His debut, also called Menergy, mostly sounds cocky, but Megatron Man is pure kitsch; it includes a B-52s style number about a race of imperial teenagers and a flamboyant cover of the theme from “Sea Hunt,” a ’50s TV show starring Lloyd Bridges, Cowley’s first childhood crush. Best of the bunch is “Get A Little,” which recruits a vocal jazz corps renamed the Patrick Cowley Singers for an ebullient jam that prefigures Stereolab’s disco parties. “If You Feel It,” the B-side to a 1987 remix of “Megatron Man,” is a more acidic trip into that same metronomic underground.

Patrick Cowley: “Goin’ Home” (Remix Dub Version)

Less than a year after Megatron Man, Cowley released Mind Warp, a bleak concept album about, and made during, his own death. This, too, began in his ears, with an infection that eventually wrecked his ravaged immune system. Mind Warp’s world of nightmare bureaucracies, villainous doctors, mysterious invasions, and psychological damage is an essential document of the AIDS plague years, earning a place beside later classics like Coil’s Scatology, Diamanda Galas’ Masque of Red Death, and Pet Shop Boys’ Behavior. Closer “Goin’ Home” is an icy farewell made as Cowley could barely get out bed—a heartbreaking end for someone whose work celebrated, and should keep on soundtracking, fabulous nights out.