This is something I've been wanting to do for a long time.
You can read more about classic House tracks than new ones - it's an old genre now and one that's probably more obsessed with its own history than any this side of Jazz and the Blues.
But what about that area between what's new and what's classic? You know what I'm talking about: tracks that are a little long in the tooth but ain't so old that your mamma knows 'em by heart. You can call this a tribute of sorts, but more than praise I want to talk about some good music that might have passed someone by in the daily deluge of largely mediocre tracks that flood the market.
So without further ado, this is my first second spin, and it's probably gonna be long because I want to talk about 3 EPs released over the course of a year that I don't think got their proper due: Mike Dunn's The Congregation EPs Volumes 1, 2 and 3.
The Congregation EPs
Mike Dunn told me back in January 2008 that he had 3 EPs slated for Defected, under the official moniker Mike Dunn presents The MD X-Spress. At this point, all we had heard from him for awhile was his voice - deeper than you remember from Phreaky Muthafuka - on a mix Terry Hunter did for our (now defunct) CD series. (That track, "This Here is House Muzik", was released about 6 to 8 months later on The Congregation EP Vol 1.)
This was right about the time that some of the old guard labels began adapting to the new reality of the recording industry. A fairly prolific label used to release maybe one or two tracks a month. These days, Defected is releasing a new single every week (more if you count their sister labels, which now includes Strictly Rhythm). This is a natural and probably even wise response to the changing marketplace, but it has two nasty side-effects: it makes it impossible for any one person to keep track of even a small portion of new releases, and the rush to shove product out the door makes the music increasingly disposable.
The Congregation EP Volume 1
I could have written this about any of the three Congregation EPs individually, but I think the 3 really need to be handled at the same time. These are way, way up on my list of the best releases of 2008 and 2009 and together I think they have a kind of raw power and - increasingly rare for underground House - they're fucking FUN.
Mike had been away from House Music for some years prior to their release. He told me (not in confidence - this was all published in interviews) that he felt a sense of betrayal when he took a stand for his crowd at one of his Chicago residencies, and his crowd turned their backs and returned to the club that was treating them like dirt. Like Tyree and Terry Hunter, he'd always had a foot in Hip-Hop, going a couple of decades. That club experience left a bad taste in his mouth - so he took that other foot out of House.
Mike did a couple of House releases that he described to me as "getting warmed up". The Congregation EPs were the fucking blast off. The track he released on our Miami 2008 sampler, "The Boy Beats on His Drum", is the countdown as far as I'm concerned, and introduces everything to come. The next Mike Dunn Greatest Hits' album needs to start with this. Here's the intro:
By the time The Congregation Vol 1 was released, he was back. "This Here is House Muzik" is the type of track that's kind of formed its own niche: long instrumentals allowing for a spoken word piece on the history of House. I get these sort of tracks from time to time in promos - one I can think of off-hand was John 'Julius' Knight and Roland Clark's "This is House" (Soulfuric, 2009), and I can remember another recent track from Loveslap! with the same blueprint. Sometimes they work and more often they don't.
But Mike Dunn was born to make this track. He didn't invent the acapella and he wasn't the first guy to give a narration of just how you should be getting down on his own tracks, but he does it better than anyone. "God Made Me Phunky", "Phreaky MF" and some of the lesser-known Muzique label classics - they were all leading up to this.
The Congregation EP Volume 2
This is where shit got real.
I'm a sucker for people who continue to take chances despite being at the top of the heap. Whether it's Gene Hunt bangin' on a windowsill to get some unique and groovy percussion effect, or Bear Who? riffing on an obscure 1980s New Wave tune, "House of Fun" on The Beatbox - the only way this shit is gonna progress is track by track pushing the envelope into terrain that the phony fear to tread.
The main track on Volume 2, "Feel the Muzik", is irresistible. The main riff and melody isn't an organ or freaky FX but a xylophone, and I swear that every time I hear it I picture kids breakdancing (fuck with the pitch a bit and it'd be a hell of a footwork tune). This one builds flawlessly to a break that you didn't see coming, from the big room strings and sudden kick to a pregnant pause while you wait for that xyla riff to come back. Ralphi Rosario and Lego did something like this with their 1998 hit "Take Me Up (Gotta Get Up)", also with a xylophone, but in a totally different way. For one thing, there were like 6 notes total on the xyla in "Gotta Get Up", and it was nowhere near as elaborate:
Mike Dunn: Feel the Muzik (BlackBall Muzik Mixx)
I'm sure a seasoned producer's mind breaks this shit down into a thousand pieces when he hears a track like this, to try to figure out how it works. I'm gonna argue here that this track is one of maybe a dozen that cannot, under any circumstances, be improved. It's that tight, man. I mean, you can just hear the evolution - put this side by side with the piano stabs from "God Made Me Phunky" and you can hear it, like a record made by James Brown in 1960 like "Night Train" next to something from the late 1960s like "Cold Sweat" or "Sex Machine". The two tracks on the surface don't have much in common, but they're sisters. It's right there, from the piano keys that bangs against your face to the xylophone hammerin' on your spine.
The only remix I've heard of this is on the same EP, with MD's vocal on top.
Mike Dunn: Feel the Muzik (Mike Dunn's BlackBall Mixx)
The Congregation EP Volume 3
There was a strange progression going on with the Congregation EPs. Volume 1 had 6 tracks; Volume 2 featured four. Volume 3 had only 3 tracks total. Nine months elapsed between the release of Volumes 1 and 2; Volume 3 was released officially only two months later, probably to get it out in time for the Winter Music Conference in March.
Mike Dunn: Git Cho House On (Children) (MD BlackBall Main Mixx)
As I said about "This Here is House Muzik", about 100 producers could try a track like this, maybe 5 could pull it off and none would do it better than Mike Dunn.
Volume 3 also featured the first (and only) high profile remixer of the series in the unlikely guise of Chocolate Puma. Does it work? I don't think so. It's one of the strangest things: Chocolate Puma were undoubtedly brought in to draw a trendy audience, but the original is far more energetic. I realize this is a matter of taste, but dropping in all those heavy electro FX, it actually made the track far less catchy - and in the break at 2:30, downright cheesy.
Mike Dunn: Git Cho House On (Children) (Chocolate Puma Remix)
The original mix is also a departure from the slick sound of the first two Congregation EPs: those drums are dirtier than anything Mike did in the 2000s and a real callback to the brilliant MD X-Spress classics of the 1990s.
But there's a lot that's different, too. 2008 was not 1994. Back in the 1990s, a producer named Mike Dunn was also a resident DJ named Mike Dunn at the Warehouse on Randolph in Chicago. A lot of those tracks were inspired by that and other places (how could they not be?) and most likely broken by that same DJ in that same club.
You say it's a different world now? Yeah, it is, but you have to wrap your mind around how different it is. These tracks were made in Chicago, released in London and I'm guessing targeted primarily to the much larger European scene than to America (hence the bewildering Chocolate Puma remix). Mike might have sent several boxes of Muzique Records to the UK, and signed a licensing deal to have a record pressed there, and otherwise had it bootlegged for a secondary market but you're talking about a record that was made, at least in part, for a specific room in a specific club in a specific city. I don't think records on this level will ever be made that way again.
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