Olati, a night of Italo Disco deep-cuts, happens Friday night at Iron Cow

The folks behind Panic! Underground let the dour mask drop for an evening devoted to that most champagne of electronic-music subgenres, Italo disco.

The evening features Robby Orlando (NM), Deca-Dance (Key Tone), Sasa Lele (Tommy Mot) and Lucky Luciano (DJ Hotfix) spinning deep cuts and classics from this sadly-overlooked late ’70s/’80s Euro-electro movement that gave us dancefloor hymns like “It’s a War,” “Bad Passion” and “Cybernetic Love,” as well as aesthetic moves that are still being swiped to this day.

An instructive, if wildly inaccurate and reductive (but who’s going to stop me!), way to conceptualize Italo disco for the beginner is to strip away electronic body music’s nihilistic future-shock and preoccupations with leather and fishnets and instead sub in Bacchanalian hedonism, satin blazers (most likely pushed up to the elbows) and bold patterns — on everything. Sunglasses are, however, de rigueur for all.

Fair warning: If they don’t play “Soul Dracula” or (ahem) “Boys,” we riot.

9 p.m., Friday, Sept. 8, Iron Cow, 2438 E. Robinson St., facebook.com/panicunderground, $5.

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This article appears in Sep 6-12, 2023.