They had worked together before on the scoring of School Daze and Muscle Up, (previously compiled by Dark Entries and Honey Soundsystem, and released to critical acclaim in 2013 and 2016). In a taped interview Coletti confessed that as he transferred the reels to filmstrip, he made edits and altered tempo on the fly, acknowledging that “I did things to his music; if he would have done it he would looped it and made it seamlessly beautiful.” This reissue corrects those formal distortions and slips of the splice block and presents Cowley’s work as it was originally crafted. Supplementing the prior anthologies School Daze and Muscle Up, the music collected on Afternooners captures Patrick Cowley’s vitality and momentum in mid-air, as he built upon the successes of his production work with Sylvester, and struggled with his own ambitions to become a star in his own right, while remaining connected to the gay underground from which he first emerged.

Porn music is functional music, meant to accompany action without upstaging what is onscreen, ramping and building towards release while subtly whispering that there’s always more to come. In the hands of some producers, this functionality can lead to rote, hackneyed exercises in genre pastiche, phoned-in stabs at broad stylistic gestures swathed in aimless solo-ing. In Patrick Cowley’s hands, the framework of porn production became not just a sketch pad but a launch pad, a base from which to leap, stretch and explore. Revealing a world of variety beneath a surface of monotonous pounding, Afternooners sets an idiosyncratic course across a wild range of genres, tempos, and positions. When the relentless forward drive of “Surfside Sex” crossfades into the syncopated claps and tom rolls of “Hot Beach,” the result sounds like new wave slowed down and loved up, the dour dry ice of then-reigning bedsit miserabilism replaced by brilliant California sunshine with an “if it rises, ride it” attitude. By contrast, “The Runner’s” almost ominous beginning telegraphs the shadows of risk and suspense implicit in the wordless, casual pickup that it accompanies in the film: a naked man offers himself to a passing stranger running by, signaling him with only a knowing look and a fast nod of the head through an open window. Though the sex that follows is indoors and steamy, there’s something of the sea gulls and grey Bay Area fog in the synthesizer chemtrails that Cowley conjures.

Other songs are more upfront. Though it’s considerably less tender in its implications, “Furlough”’s low-slung funk groove bears more than a passing resemblance to Michael Jackson’s “P.Y.T.” But Cowley throws in a surprisingly metallic curveball in the form of a wonderfully catchy bridge dripping with flange effects. While in general one cannot say that Coletti’s editing of Afternooners was terribly strict about pairing music with image, it can hardly be accidental that the first really explosive orgasm achieved during anal sex is synched to the flourishes that peak midway in “Furlough.” If Cowley’s shameless deployment of cowbell risks collapsing “Leather Bound” into a kind of parody of what people expect from gay porno muzak, the unexpectedly tangy cascades of synthesized Chinoiserie that follow pass through kitsch and into some delirious hall of mirrors that lies beyond. Dropping the tempo without grinding the gears, “Bore & Stroke” adds copious amounts of echo to the mix, upping the weirdly pastoral and playful feeling of an intergalactic bordello. The occasional scything of belly-dancer zills across the mix on an offbeat prompts the unprovable speculation that maybe, just maybe, Art of Noise might have staggered into a screening of Afternooners at some point before writing “Moments in Love.” The double-time rave up conclusion might seem unexpected to home listeners, but onscreen it soundtracks the climax of a sweaty three way and the transition into the next scene.

