It’s hardly surprising that many Chicago house music producers got bitter, adopted a bunker mentality or toured the world making money DJing after watching their pioneering graft get watered down in the mainstream. Yet while the city fell out of the spotlight after house music’s late 80s dam-busting, the originators’ old crowds hunkered into a second wave of producers, forging a harder strain of wigged-out house, influenced by European developments and nearby Detroit, rather than Philly soul and disco.
These included future titans such as Derrick Carter, Gemini, Glenn Underground, Cajmere, DJ Sneak and Boo Williams, who started releasing hard-as-nails jack tracks on Curtis Jones’ cult Relief imprint with 1994’s A New Beginning EP. Asked to make an album, Williams rose to the occasion with his personal tribute to house music, crowning jackhammer beats and cranium-slicing hi-hats with hypnotic loops and soulful melodic interplay.
Originally released on two 12”s, the album launches Anotherday, a new UK label dedicated to unearthing such forgotten classics. It’s a rip-snorting start, with titles such as Old School Flavor and Snare Tappin’, the deceptively-named Lazy Mood and siren-driven title track laying brutal but beautiful blueprints for later minimal styles. Not only has it not dated, but it provides a savage lesson in dancefloor dynamics for today’s laptop upstarts.
