In this episode we explore the sort of house music that I and other deejays played at the warehouse parties of the 90s in Chicago. I recently mixed again with my original equipment from way back when in the 90s at a warehouse party for old people hosted by my friend "Chicago Tommy" at his company's warehouse. We painted, thanks to Tommy's homemade easels and canvases, and danced, and ate, thanks to everyone who brought a dish to share, and it was all over around 9PM because while our spirits are still youthful and in my case more free than when I was in my 20s in the 90s, we're old now.

Thanks to James R for helping me to get this posted. He's been getting me acclimated to the world of modern technology for a couple of years now, and much to everyone's chagrin is the main reason that I have a website for my writing and podcasts and stuff like that.

I redid the mix to be more to my liking from the party at which I was pretty rusty and didn't hold together some of the tracks as well as I would have liked. I don't have the modern mixing equipment that matches the beat for you, so I had to do it manually, as we did back in the day. This is a continuous mix, so there are no track breaks, but here is what I remember of what I mixed plus some other tracks as well:

1. I love this first track so much, it's a remix of the Fleetwood Mac song "Sarah." I think it was done by this dude who calls himself "Doctor Soul." He ran it through all kinds of filters and effects to make Stevie Nicks extra dreamy, and then sped it up and gave it that "four on the floor" house beat that gives the body the universal signal to move.

2. I heard this one really early in my warehouse party days because it was very popular in Chicago. It was a "French house filter track," as we used to say, by DJ. Gregory called "Sunshine People," I think the sample is from Chic. This version is from Darrio D Attis.

3. This sample, which I always called "Street Life," because that's the name of the Crusaders song that it was taken from, was super popular in Chicago. I think that I first heard Derrick Carter playing the version by Cricco Castelli. Everyone used to go crazy when that organ stab started to play and loop in joyful circles. This version is from Purple Disco Machine who is this Turkish German guy, if I understand correctly.

4. This song is called "Soul Power," by Full Intention. It's a good example of "Gospel house." The four on the floor beat of house music is from Gospel music. It's like when people start catching the Holy Ghost, and the organist is slamming all four bass pedals to the floor like she's banging out a bass rhythm, but there's a lot of disco elements in this song too, like the staccato string stabs and bubbly rhythm sounds. Full Intention have been around since the beginning.

5. I just call this next track "chucking" because it sounds like the disco chucking on guitar that Nile Rodgers used to do. It's from another Turkish German guy who's been around forever called "Mousse T."

6. This one was called "Ron Hardy's Revenge" after a famous saying by Ron Hardy that house music was disco's revenge. This contains a now very popular sample that Ron Hardy used to play over tracks that he was spinning. It's a Disco Diva, maybe Loleatta Holloway or Evelyn King or Thelma Houston or Norma Jean Wright giving a speech about resilience in the face of adversity. I always forget who this is, and it's hard to figure out a good way to search for it, but Ron Hardy (RIP) definitely invented playing an inspirational a cappella track over a beat.

7. I call this one "Jack Chicago," and I know very little about it. But it's full of fun, filter builds and horn stabs and a great sample of someone saying "jack Chicago," and "He's really the only one for me." It like a super badass, radio advertisement for Chicago house music.

8. This one is super disco-y. The sample is people saying "Break down the door," I think, which sounds like some super awesome disco emergency in which you have to get into the club to "dance your ass off," as Sal Soul used to say.

9. This one is Nick Holder, and it's called "Paradise." I really love the disco dance floor peaks and swells in this one. Holder takes us all to Paradise here, especially with those high pitched synth chirps that sound like the birds of paradise or angels calling us to a tropical heaven.

10. I call this one "keep on trucking" because that was a popular saying in the 70s, and this track sounds like a disco trucker rolling down the highway, but then there are these awesome deep strings making it sound like that "Disco Fever" track that I remember from the double album from the movie soundtrack that my parents had, which was called something like "Journey to Disco Mountain." I used to beg my mother to play that disco mountain song because that was one disco peak I yearned to scale over and over again in 1978. Whatever else is going on in this song, it almost sounds kind of country too, like that "Devil Went Down to George" song, which I also begged my mother to play over and over again in 1978. Fiddle battles between the Oakridge Boys and the Devil were pretty epic.

11. This is an Ian Pooley track, who is my favorite German producer and deejay. This one feels like a swirling, Latin rumba or something. I saw Ian once at the Detroit Movement festival a long time ago, and he seemed to raise his larger to me as I would lose my mind to each new groove that he mixed into. When Germans raise their steins to you, it means, "Respect, bro, thank you for acting like an out of control loser when play my tunes. It means a lot to me since I've come all the way here to Detroit from the far away land of the German people."

12. I only know that this one has a Sister Sledge sample in it, and it might be called "Disco Tools." It's so fun, and what a great build to a tremendous disco eruption!

13 This one is Karizma, and it was a very popular gospel house track maybe a decade ago or so. The sample is from a classic gospel song, which I don't know the name of, but the lead singer and the choir are singing about having bills due and how God is going to "Work It Out." James Baldwin wrote in his classic "Go Tell It on the Mountain," that when the church music hits you, there is no question of doubt, you're just fully ensconced in belief. We all need a few moments of full on religious psychosis on a daily basis, especially when bills are due and there isn't much in the bank, because somebody's got to work that out.

https://www.martinessig.com

Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co for the intro and outro music of most episodes, I mix the mixtapes that I post here.