House Is A Feeling

So it’s been ages since I did a proper chart. There is a wealth of good music around and I’ve been steadily buying stuff even while I wasn’t blogging. This is a chart of mostly new stuff with a few old tracks thrown in.

1. Losoul-Raw Beauty (Playhouse)

Losoul can almost always be relied upon to make really interesting off kilter house, but this loose groove is the best thing he’s done in a couple of years I think. What I find interesting about this kind of house music and the current wave of enthusiasm for it is how drunken this music sounds.

Where minimal was associated with wild drug excess, regardless of the fact that nobody has ever had to do bags of drugs to like any type of music, the house sound that’s so popular at the moment seems like real drinking music to me. Of course that’s not to say anyone going on all night binges is going to be disgusted by this stuff, far from it!

2. Loco Dice-La Esquina (Desolat)

I like two tracks from Loco Dice’s new album, which isn’t a bad return for a dance LP I guess! The first is the Oslo-esque “How Do I Know”, and the second is this fairly shameless house-fest. This is a bit like Julien Jabre or somebody, though thankfully not quite as evocative of Chris Rea’s “Driving Home For Christmas” as Jabre’s “Swimming Places” was.

People often will say “Oh it’s all Martin Buttrich” about a production team like this, but I think Buttrich’s own stuff is pretty disappointing a lot of the time, and I like several Loco Dice tunes. Maybe the ideas guy does really matter.

3. Drei Farben House-Menswear (Brut!)

I’m pretty bored by a lot of melodic trancey Dial type stuff these days (apart from the Pigon and Carsten/Carsten tracks off that last EP), or anything that has that kind of Kompakt sad swoon to it, but this is an exception. There’s just enough house in this to grab my interest, and I guess I loved that style enough in the past that I still am partial. Also I challenge you to listen to this and not feel a bit wistful. This reminds me of Cassy a bit, it has that same sort of warm fragility to it, and sounds so spaced out and lost, it takes a real journey to arrive at a sound like this.

4. Robert Hood-And Then We Planned Our Escape (Music Man)

The tube. Hot and stinking at the best of times. On Sunday I trudged up a few flights of stairs after 6 days work in a row, listening to this track as a strong draft flew towards me from the outside. I turned this up to deafening volume and fought my way outside where the sun was beating down. With the wind in my face walking through the underground, this was the first “wow” moment I’ve had in ages, though in my teens I’d feel like that listening to music all the time.

That anecdote doesn’t say a lot about the record I guess, but it does make you wonder. Could another record at that time have had the exact same effect? Who can say how much of this is context and how much is the sounds themselves? It was damn good though. Nice to see Carl Craig singling this out in the Wire recently, I like it above and beyond anything else on the recent Hood Music releases. The track title is really evocative too.

5. Tadeo-Cosmos (Cassy Movin’ On Mix) (Apnea)

This one is really special. I suppose this sort of track is the holy grail for dance producers, in that it that doesn’t noticeably change at all over 10 minutes after the intro, yet demands your interest. The changes are stealthy, the whole thing locks you into that cage of repetition that’s synonymous with really great dance music. Like Drei Farben House this sounds sort of desolate and detached, it’s funny, there’s nothing “fun” about this music, yet people party to it.

That conflict seems to go right to the heart of dance music, the intensity of the party is such that the music is often very serious, no matter what genre it is. When you think about it, it’s quite a weird cultural evolution that has led to this type of music soundtracking parties.

6. Marcus Fix-You Don’t Know Me (Below)

This one sounds a bit like Moodymann’s “LiveinLA1998″ gone a little minimal, with that same live piano feel. I really like the drama of this, and the way digital elements are combined with a trip aboard the musicianship. Often that’s a boring journey full of rules and reverence but Fix isn’t afraid to mix the keys with less organic elements.

7. Lemos and Kreon-Lyly Shere (Anthony Collins Mix) (Resopal)

Paul Ritch’s close collaborator Anthony Collins has had a ton of big releases, but I found his style a bit formulaic fairly quickly. This track is serious though. People are mixing instruments and digital production techniques in way that’s so exciting, it actually makes a mockery of the rhetorical divides between “real” instruments and digital ones. Here Collins takes Kreon and Lemos’s excellent original and spins it out into a blurry and woozy ten minute anthem. Again it’s so loose and sloppy. This is just begging to be played as the sun comes up.

8. Macida Yayo-Sleepless Night (Mossa Remix) (Monsterecs)

Both sides of this remix EP are really worth having. The Mossa remix above is a slightly less submerged piece of dub-techno in the Basic Channel style. It also reminds me of Aphex Twin’s “Analogue Bubblebath” quite a bit. I know very little about Macida Yayo or Monsterecs but this EP (with a great Miss Fitz mix on the flip) is one I can imagine myself playing for months.

9. Lucy-Downstairs (H.O.S.H Remix) (Meerestief Ltd)

This is my favourite Diynamic associated release in a long time. It’s a bit more straight up than a lot of their stuff, though the general feel is still pretty wacky and dramatic. Diynamic couldn’t really have been around at any point except now could it? I mean, these guys really do make trancey deep house, a genre that was probably unthinkable for many years, and for many people still is!

10. Blaze-Lovelee Dae (Playhouse)

Many songs have many remixes, but “Lovelee Dae” must have more worthwhile remixes than most. There are two amazing Eight Miles High remixes, the slamming uptempo house one plus an ultra-slow jaw rattling dub version that’s such a summer track it’ll have the skin peeling from your arms. (Check it out on this amazing compilation, from one of the best compilation labels around.)

I’ve included the original in this chart though, because it seems a good place to start. When the weather is like it has been lately, can you imagine anything better than being up to your neck in sound in a field or club somewhere listening to this record? An all-time classic.

Expect another chart by early next week at the latest, got to make up for lost time, and I just realised I want to blog about 15 or 20 other tracks too! Let me know what you think of these, or recommend your own stuff if you like.

PS: You can buy all of these tracks on MP3 at Whatpeopleplay or Beatport, and most likely on vinyl too at Juno or Phonica or Decks.