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| quote: | Originally posted by gummybear
Pardon my ignorance but in my world chicago house has always been Funky, groovy, vocal house...if you look at how and when chicago house originated..there was nothing techy, trancy, minimal about it..
Mark Farina has always played a groovy and funky house set...at least the 8 times I have seen him. the same goes for.....Larry Heard..Marshall Jefferson...DJ Sneak..Derrick Carter...Frankie Knuckles....etc..etc.. |
ha ha - ok consider yourself pardoned - forgive the history lesson, but its required to understand house and techno:
as you know, chicago is where house started, and from the beginning it never referred to a type of music at all, but rather a vibe, and also a place where you could hear this music - The Warehouse. Knuckles played everything and anything there, including just bizarre sound effects records.
Between him and Ron Hardy was where house music was born. Hardy played everything very very fast - usually +8 on the table - and always opened with "welcome to the pleasure dome", which if you know it, you'll know its techno as much as anything. mostly he played euro stuff and would go to the trouble of playing an 808 drum machine under it just to bang it out harder.
on wbmx, you'd have hot mix shows that would literally have every kind of music on it - live mixes from great chicago djs.... oh, and the star mixer on that show was jeff mills.
techno owes pretty much its entire existence to 'chicago' house because juan atkins, derrick may, and saunderson, would literally drive every weekend from detroit to chicago to hear hardy play. after a while of this, they'd make some tunes, and give them to hardy to play, to see how they went down. so if hardy was playing house, he was playing techno, because he was constantly playing their tunes.
look at the release on the pioneering Trax label. half of them are called techno, tho the distinction is really irrelevant.
well all that was the first wave of house, the second coming with derrick carter and green velvet. derrick would go to hear ron hardy too, and would take away what he learned there to go make his own tunes. the second coming of chicago house was kick started through green velvet's Relief records, where many of those tracks you're referring to(sneak, etc.) were released. but, that label too is mostly techno.
part of the charm of chicago djs is that the real ones WILL play anything. disco, folk, prince, u2, whatever - i've heard derrick just stop playing house and drop an hour of hip hop, mark too, many times. if you're heard derrick spin recently, you'll know he can get very techy, but also deep. that's what's good about it.
farina has carved out his own niche, as he lives on the west coast, where its more natural to embody a lighter, jazzier take on things, but he'll play weird, unexpected stuff too.
the great thing about chicago house is that you should expect the unexpected.
come on by to the heather party and you'll hear what i mean.
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possibly cuz he knew what type of crowd he was playin for...
