At least someone here is cultured. Ok, enough procrastinating. There's no right or wrong way to do this and, as a lackadaisical approach isn't an option, best to write.
House. What is House, to quote LFO? Repetitive beats, 4x4 or 1/1 time, structured across 110-125bpm range frameworks. Organ keyboards, synths, drum machines, samples, vocal work. As many moods contained therein as there are human emotions. Cities, networks, labels, producers, distributors, record buyers, record players, sound system collectives. Parties, dancing outdoors or in venues, individuals, groups, paid admission or free. Steeped in myth, scalped and pimped for £ and material gain. Drugs. No drugs. A liturgy of sub-genres. Shamanic but scoffed at, yet somehow it survives. There are at least 4 House threads on Dissensus, so something in this spectral chain of operations must be working.
House keyed its way into my heart by persistence of intuitive seeking, always returning to why this music fit a modal form that allows for genuine transcendence. Why could one composition elevate you like a human kite and another fall a long way short? The gated arches into this vast universe aren't like a cathedral's - there's no genuflection and incense, no guilt or shame. The threshold breaker was rhythm and succinct architectural ideas around composition, groove and harmony. A behemoth sized intro is best served at this juncture. For a pointer we have to shift our focus back a tad to 1983(ish) and include a gargantuan slab of bass and rhythm, topped off by a vocalist who has you in the palm of her hand. Behold
Drool. It's ok to drool with ESG. The moody female ear-worm lilt, its slightly melancholic tease and funk on the scale of an ancient Egyptian pyramid. A creeper that grew and grew. I remember a school friend trying to breakdance to it on a piece of cardboard one weekend, ghetto-blaster on in an underpass, except the dozen kids gathered round broke into a mass improvised funk-out when this specific song dropped. Instantaneous possession. A tune of precedence and presence, which still felt like a continuation rather than an accelerated, sci-fi departure. As there's padraig (u.s.) proto-House thread, i don't want to detour too much. In no time, a series of records arrived that blew the saloon bar doors open and ultimately changed the course of my life. 'On and On' and 'Dancing Ghosts' have been referenced already, so to illustrate how minor adjustments in music production can still prove revolutionary and why they've been sought out like a homing beacon (before exploring any live setting), shapeshifting forms like these are a necessary illustrative and ritual porthole pointing toward the divine
The chopped 'H-h-h-h-h-hooouuuse' segment of House Nation's vocal editing fully follows the repetition mandate. The intuition to run with it while it was being composed is another matter though. That someone caught this idea and mapped it out amazes me still. It took the groove of a track like Moody and machine-fed it through a crucible of chrome minimalism. Musical and harmonic perfection, underpinned by genius arrangement and pacing. Hearing it at a friend's home, who now had 2 technics turntables, it hypnotised by both the audacity of its licks, chops and structure, but also the red dotted band that hovered around the turntable's red light as it played. The game was on.
Some time in between Christmas 1987 and NYE a group of us travelled with an older sister and fake i.d.'s to the Hacienda and even though we stuck to trips and speed, my mate's sister was clearly in a world of wonder once inside. I'd never seen anyone dance like that before. Ever. She
was fluid, uncontainable but with so much grace and synchronisation. There were no Ritzy monkeys, hardly anyone over 35 and no edge to 98% of the venue's regulars. As the night churned through galactic sized gears, you lost yourself in lighting beams and the sheer bollocks of the thump. The universe itself slowly turned inside out and something, a connection, lost knowledge, provocative bewitchment, unity and fun (essentially) ripped through my soul. Somehow, in fuckin Manchester with its wanker fitba teams and coded haircuts, i'd found an alternative home.
Apart from one distinct no-go area corner for dealers, the evening was a lurid technicolour adventure into a different mode of engagement with both rhythm itself, twisted interpretative movement and these gurning, peaceful, joking mass of nutters. The odd wink, faces lit up with revelation, barely able to contain this ineffable joy. Their expression were similar to the familiarity of finding a lost secret (maybe that was the acid) and that secret wanted to let go and free-fall head-first like a diver into the mystic. Oh dear, the boy's in love.
3 other records from that long night of the soul need citations
When we eventually came back down to Earth the only subsequent quest worth fuck all presented itself - who was making all these records and how many could we afford per week? There was only one personal answer - start selling draw too. When i bought KC Flight at Eastern Bloc a few weeks later, the cellophane seal opened and with all the Burroughs, RAW and TOPY 23 fixations resonating in the cultural milieu, '123bpm' echoed back in clear, stark print. The collision of this magic tempo was an egress into new zones of reality, where your duty, job, recreation time, sketchily earned £'s, ears consumed by possession, were all in alignment. Your primary reasons for being now expanded exponentially alongside sex. As luck would have it, Graham Park was based in Nottingham and a local club, The Garage/Kool-Kat/The Garage, started a floor for all things new and electronic. There was only one missing piece to this fantastical puzzle and that changed on NYE a few nights after our Manchester mission, somewhere in a anarcho-squat type dive in Forest-Fields. My mate Chrissy led me into a corner as dub soaked the mix of cold and sweat he handed one of these. We'll deal with the consequences asap
Don't know if i'll have time to post another 87/88 synopsis before the seasonal madness breaks, so everyone stay safe, stay House and take care. And if you can't jive with House, no stress, there's a long way to go.