THIS BLOG HAS MOVED

MY NEW LOCATION

Please update your links, and bear with me while I add Feedburner and similar stuff to the new site, should be a better looking blog overall. See you there!

Further into the haze of the jungle....

So 2007 has kicked off, and already a new Mobilee by Marcin Czibula, new Liebe Detail by Ripperton/Lars Behrenroth, and some other neat stuff are doing the promo rounds. I'm really enjoying Minilogue's Birdsong forthcoming later this year on Wagon Repair. If minimal is to become more deep and I guess, organic sounding, then gimme this over the "soulful" Buttrich bargrooves any day of the week (sorry but "Cloudy Bay" sucked), incorporating older house sounds shouldn't mean losing all the dub, and thankfully Minilogue provide a good example of how it should be done on this 12. I often feel like I'm giving too much mention to this style anyway, the reality is there is still plenty of non US sounding minimal coming out, just a lot of the bigger releases are starting to sound a bit more like deep house. However what will separate the wheat from the chaff ultimately is the dubby/druggy elements in the sound....when these are lost there's nothing original whatsoever about deep electronic house, it just loses the vitality and originality of "minimal" and becomes "TECH HOUSE" or something equally boring.

"Birdsong" is a seriously dense record, so tropical and otherworldly, if you liked Kemi and Amox's "Natas" and Marc Antona's release on Freak N Chic last year which I blogged about here, then you'll like this too. These records are submerged underneath a deep misty haze. But the melodies which come into "Birdsong" after 4 or 5 minutes of groove are just so lonely and forlorn, the stuff of amazing house music. This weird nature vibe (did this begin with poppier incarnations like "The Whistler" and "Kookaburra") can only do good things for house, or a new genre perhaps "beardinal" (minibeard anyone?). It's like the nightclub is a jungle and the listener is on a solo mission through the trees, and it's no surprise that "Birdsong" clocks in at 10 minutes. Also, can you tell these records make me want to do drugs again? They do!

All of the above brings us nicely to one of my favourite house records of all time, and one which I think may be THE best Chicago house tune. It also should give my recent obsession with this weird sub sub genre of tropical/dub/nature house sounds some context....maybe this was the original tropical house tune....I hope you all like it as much as I do...enjoy

Tags: minimal, house music, downloads