This Week's Essential Reading
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10 Saturday, December 22, 2012 www.thenational.ae The National thereview The National thereview Saturday, December 22, 2012 www.thenational.ae 11 this week’s essential reading ’Ian Rankin: 50 songs The crime novelist’s main character Rebus is a massive music fan, but what does music { I love’, Sabotage Times the author love? Van Morrison, Joy Division, Black Sabbath, Throbbing Gristle … } playlist Dance music known as Chicago house, named for a nightclub in the Windy City Bangs & Works Vol. 1 & 2 (Planet Mu) Various artists House The two separate volumes of Bangs & Works ushered footwork into the ears (and addled brains) of listeners the world over, many of them now under the sway of a sound still very much in its development rules phase. This Ain’t Chicago: The Underground Sound of UK House & Acid 1987-1991 (Strut) Various artists The DJ known as Johnny Fiasco, a progenitor of Chicago house music. This recent two-CD set tells the story of house as it travelled beyond the bounds of Chicago, seeding the ground for rave scenes and other Taking its name from an inner-city Tales of inventive nights when It’s all intriguingly spacious and such illicit enterprises such wisdom reigned remain, even strange, with a habit for vocal sam- on the other side of the if mostly in the romantic amber ples that fix on a stutter or a single Atlantic Ocean. dance club in Chicago, this may be glow of history. But the spirit of Chi- snippet of an utterance and then the most innovative style of music cago house thrives. Elements of the repeat it until otherwise standard music have been revived in contem- speech starts to sound otherworld- and dance that you’ve never heard porary sounds that catalyse dance ly. It happens in high supply on an- Green Velvet (F-111) clubs around the world, from Lon- other hallmark album, DJ Rashad’s of, writes Andy Battaglia don to Berlin to anywhere, really, Teklife Vol. 1: Welcome to the Chi, Green Velvet where a liking for sensuousity and which highlights footwork’s links This compilation of space has introduced itself into the to the swagger and strut of hip-hop. seminal Green Velvet formula for dance music that can It also works its way, less so but You can’t help but wonder about a surveys a particular corner of Chi- be as suggestive as it is straightfor- with a more lasting sense of subtle- hits hard, in meticulous man who names himself Johnny cago house in all its kinetic glory. The spirit of disco: House music fans dance along to a laser light show. Getty Images ward. ty, into the best of the new Chicago and minimal ways, with Fiasco. What is his life like? What Johnny Fiasco figures into it, as The spirit lives on in Chicago too, footwork albums, The Space Zone by Flash, The Stalker and makes him tick? Has he managed does an eclectic cast of perform- though in different forms. One of Young Smoke. He’s young – just 18 Answering Machine, to make his friends call him that? ers and producers who took their techno, however, house prioritised Chicago house is seductive and signifier who helped establish the a voice wielded by Mitchbal & The them, the newest and most notable, when the album came out and all of which chronicles a (If so, did it require a lot or a little cues from new ways to make people levity and euphoric signs of life. sly in ways that Cajmere likes to spirit of Chicago house in its early Housemaster coos “when I hear the goes by the name of “footwork”, in 19 now – but Young Smoke presents string of insane phone convincing?) freak out in the Windy City. You can hear them at work together play with. In Chit Chat, he sends stages in the early 1980s. music, that house music, I go crazy, reference to the mode of dancing a widescreen vision that enlists messages in song. Plus The questions only compound Chief among that cast is Cajmere in the Only 4 U track Le Fusion by up the culture of dance-floor flirta- That elemental spirit can be shot – I get hot, I start jackin’ my it engenders. (Imagine a futuristic footwork as a sort of soundtrack the cover offers a great when Johnny Fiasco also happens himself, who works as well under Gemini, who mixes some seem- tion with spoken-word parts that heard on 122 BPM: The Birth of body and I just can’t stop”. octopus in a cartoon dangling its for an imagined sci-fi fantasia. The view of his crazy yellow to be responsible for the creation of the alias Green Velvet – recognis- ingly nonsensical vocal chattering parrot the worst kind of pick-up House Music, a recent 3-CD set Indeed, there’s a sense of unbri- legs and floating a few inches above whole album sticks to a unified mu- mohawk. Taurus, a dance-music track for the able in his formative years for his (it sounds like wandering though a lines (“Do you like the colour blue compiled and mixed by Jerome dled, uncontrollable energy in Chi- the ground, and you begin to get a sical theme that draws on vintage ages. It skitters, floats, soars, swells; fluorescent mohawk hair. He is one spirited cocktail party in a country or red? Oh really now”). In Feelin’ Derradji. A student of the style who cago house that owes its genesis sense of what footwork dancing is sensations of “space music” and every sublime part of it seems con- of many legends of Chicago house, you’ve never visited) over a slight but Kinda High, over a stomping up- calls Chicago home, Derradji digs to after-hours parties in inner-city like. Really, look it up on YouTube.) burns extra thrusters toward a new ceived and crafted in mind of mo- most of them African-American, commanding beat that intercuts right beat, he introduces elements deep into history to present house dance clubs (including The Ware- The music for footworking has version to take its place. Trax Records: The 20th Anniversary tion. It’s an anthem for ecstatic acts, who dreamt up a sound to follow a walking bass-line with bursts of of musical wooziness that threat- as a simultaneously sparkling and house, the source of the genre’s travelled beyond Chicago mainly on It’s spelt out in the song titles – Collection (Trax) and it counts as a classic, of a sort. in the spirit of disco. Theirs was a sinister laughs. en to make a listener want to tum- ramshackle project that developed name). Such were the settings in- curious compilations until the past Traps in Space, Destroy Him My Ro- But then, it remains even more so new strain of disco, though, for a It’s there too, in Cajmere’s clas- ble to the ground and roll around over time. From the start, pride of tegral to establishing the strangely few months, when the notion of the bots, Alien Pad, Lazer Hornz. But it’s Various artists unknown, just one of hundreds and new age of electronic machines. It sic 1992 single Percolator, an ar- with a slinky sense of wasted won- place goes to tracks that survey alien and yet somehow also accom- full and proper footwork “album” even more clearly communicated Surveying the inventory even thousands of effectively anon- was weird, wired, wild, unhinged, chetypal rendering of the Chicago der. what it means to “jack” – a method modating sense of atmosphere at has gained some currency. The in a sparse, spare, radically strange of Trax, the most storied ymous electronic dance tracks that always at least a little bit beyond the house form and a strong candi- Not all of it is pointed or provoca- of dancing that involves bucking play in tracks like The Jackin’ Zone, first of the recent wave was Trax- but also studious sound that seems label in Chicago house, do their duty to get people dancing bounds of control. date for the best song in any genre tive in any one particular way. In one’s body (or at least attempting which functions like an internal man’s Da Mind of Traxman, which to appreciate its roots in the origins this 3-CD set gathers a and then spin back into expectant Only 4 U surveys a fertile period for about a means for brewing coffee. Lalalalala (Inside My Head), Ca- to) in the fitful, collapsing, fold-up monologue transmitted from the begins with a prototypical track of Chicago house without miring silence, waiting to be played again. it, beginning in the early 1990s, a Very little happens in Percolator, jmere simply sets out a tight, tidy mode of a jackknife. head of someone either out of his called Footworkin’ on Air: beneath itself in the past. It shows respect, slew of classics – No Way That, in essence, is the story of Chi- few years after house music in Chi- but its merging of a disembodied beat with bouncy arpeggios from a The set begins with musical agita- mind or in uncommon touch with the twinned sounds of an African and a worthwhile lack-of-respect, Back by Adonis, Can You cago house music, a sound seeded cago found its form. Like the simi- voice (devoted to intoning varia- synthesizer and then steps back to tions delivered by way of Jackmas- his innermost thoughts – or both. thumb piano and a slow-rolling where all respect is due.