I like odd music. I’ve always liked odd music. When I bought my first long player — With The Bea­t­les — it was odd music.

I’ve never quite recov­ered from the five note sequence when Lennon sings the last word in the title of Not A Sec­ond Time — a sequence which famously led The Times music critic, William Mann, to opine:

one gets the impres­sion that they think simul­ta­ne­ously of har­mony and melody, so firmly are the major tonic sev­enths and ninths built into their tunes, and the flat sub­me­di­ant key switches, so nat­ural is the Aeo­lian cadence at the end of Not A Sec­ond Time

Forty years since I bought the long­player with my saved pocket money, that song still rings odd. ¹ It’s an odd few min­utes in the same way the first few Velvet’s albums were very odd, The Ramones’ début was odd as fuck and so were the first two PIL albums. This, of course, needs to be placed in cul­tural con­text and to a kid now lis­ten­ing to that rad­i­cal sec­ond Bea­t­les album, Not A Sec­ond Time doesn’t sound odd. That’s because odd rede­fined nor­mal. And nor­mal there­after was the accep­tance of that odd. Not A Sec­ond Time still sounds odd to me because I can place it in the con­text it arrived.

What wasn’t odd was Paul McCart­ney get­ting a Grammy for Best Solo Male Vocal for a take of Hel­ter Skel­ter on one of his bi-annual throw­away live albums. The best male rock vocal in the whole world in 2010 was, if you trust the National Acad­emy of Record­ing Arts and Sci­ences, a for­got­ten track on a for­got­ten album which cov­ered a frankly mediocre song from his 40 year old once rev­o­lu­tion­ary and, yes, odd, band. That’s not odd, it’s tragic. Even the sev­eral years late com­ing to Arcade Fire in the awards can’t make up for that state­ment of major label real­ity divorce. Not that it’s any­thing new, nor an indi­ca­tor of any­thing more mean­ing­ful than the fact that the Gram­mys have long been tosh.

I’m more inter­ested in who will buy EMI, now that WMG is on the block too? Does BMG buy both? Can they be that stu­pid? No, of course not and the only way it makes sense for any­one to buy either label is to sim­ply buy the copy­rights and start afresh. The infra­struc­ture of both is nei­ther an asset nor a desir­able bur­den for any buyer surely.

And Sony may (but we know won’t although they’re happy to float the idea of course) want out of iTunes which would be an act of supreme and ter­mi­nal stu­pidly in 2011.

Early house music was odd.

Early house music was very odd, and as with The Bea­t­les it’s hard to grasp exactly how odd twenty five years on.

When it arrived we all stood back and asked our­selves (repeat­edly) wtf is this? The first house record played in New Zealand was a Far­ley ‘Jack­mas­ter’ Funk sin­gle in late 1986. I’d bought it at the rec­om­men­da­tion of my usual UK disc sup­plier, East­ern Bloc in Man­ches­ter and when it had arrived I’d played it at home over and over try­ing work out what it was.

I liked it but knew not how it would work in a club envi­ron­ment. Roger Perry played it one night at The Asy­lum and it split the dance­floor — the soul boys were aghast, and the hair­dressers loved it.

Which brings me to the long player I love the very most this par­tic­u­lar week — the mighty Trax Re-edited col­lec­tion released on DJ friendly vinyl, CD and, natch, dig­i­tal, by the folks at DJ His­tory and Harm­less.

Some things are, by their implied nature, almost untouch­able and so it is with much of the early house music. It recalls a moment when their odd­ness pre­saged a musi­cal rev­o­lu­tion (as much as those Bea­t­les or Ramones records did) and there is, oddly still, some­thing almost sacred about them. How­ever, that said, they were mutants too — they were rough rework­ings, using the newly avail­able tech­nol­ogy of drum machines and dig­i­tal sam­plers, of the disco records that had filled the newly hun­gry dance­floors of the decade before.

They were totally dis­re­spect­ful imi­ta­tions of what came earlier.

I know that and part of what makes me love these old shit­tily pressed and appallingly mas­tered old Trax, DJ Inter­na­tional and Under­ground labelled records is that they dis­sected their own roots so thor­oughly and irreverently.

For all that, the idea of some­one rework­ing the twelve inches of per­fec­tion that is Larry Heard’s Can You Feel It — a sim­ple but bru­tally intense few min­utes with­out vocals (in its orig­i­nal mix — the ver­sions with super­flu­ous dubbed MLK and other vocals are not worth your time) that has rarely been equalled, filled me with dread. Or Jamie Principal’s Frankie Knuck­les pro­duced Cold World — eas­ily one of my favourite 12″ sin­gles of all time. My fears were mostly not grounded in ratio­nalé but nostalgia.

And, this, despite the hype, is not the first time many of these have been reworked, or sim­ply cleaned up. I have a series of quite stun­ning 10″ and 12″ sin­gles issued in the late 1980s by Trax UK which matched up remas­tered Trax cuts with a bunch of fairly respectable and respect­ful remixes by the likes of The Advent and Base­ment Jaxx.

How­ever that was a mighty long time ago (was it really? yes…) and much of this stuff has long been only avail­able on cheap comps or boot­leg 12“s often sound­ing lit­tle bet­ter than those orig­i­nal Trax press­ings (noto­ri­ously on reprocessed vinyl — I have a copy of the sem­i­nal Acid Tracks with a large bit of paper pok­ing out of the plas­tic — I love it all the more for that, but I can’t player the fucker).

But enough ram­bling — for the his­tory of this mighty, but might­ily dys­func­tional record label, I rec­om­mend you to the videos here, where Bill Brew­ster and Frank Broughton of DJ His­tory talk all things Trax and Chicago house with Ian Dewhirst.

It is of course to these three that we owe this new col­lec­tion, and as impor­tantly, the fact that it’s been done not only taste­fully but also not over­loaded with the obvi­ous ‘Hits of Trax’™. That means that for every Ado­nis’ No Way Back (likely in the top five com­piled Chi house tracks of all time) there are at least three tracks that only the most hard­core, reten­tive, Trax trainspot­ter (or DJ His­tory forum mem­ber) knows.

So what doesn’t work?

Noth­ing.

There isn’t a sin­gle moment when I’ve gone ‘no, please, no…’

There are a cou­ple of tracks that seem to offer lit­tle more than a happy and affec­tion­ate touch-up, and that’s fine, but when it kicks it really kicks. The open­ing track, Virgo 4’s Take Me Higher, a song that owes more than a pass­ing debt to Big Audio Dynamite’s E=MC2, as reworked by Rang Mang, is just lovely, all shim­mers and waves, and that kicks into Far­ley ‘Jack­mas­ter’ Funk’s Far­ley Knows House, an obscure-ish groove that is all clat­ter­ing 808s and per­cus­sion, and I can feel the dance­floor drag­ging me back to 1987 and all that won­der­ful oddness.

That takes you to one of the album’s high­lights, the afore men­tioned (and much loved) Cold World — a track that is either cred­ited to Jamie Prin­ci­pal, or Frankie Knuck­les (here, the lat­ter, as with the 1987 OG) depend­ing on the ver­sion. The Hotel Motel edit sounds like it’s another lov­ing re-tweak until, at around 6 min­utes (the orig­i­nal was only 5.30) it heads off in a padded per­cus­sive direc­tion that the orig­i­nal only hinted at, find­ing itself touch­ing on deep melodic acid a cou­ple of min­utes later. It’s gorgeous.

And so it goes, track by track it really does work. It’s warm, it’s rev­er­en­tial, albeit not overly, it’s vaguely mod­ern but not des­per­ately so, and best of all, the one track I was most dread­ing hear­ing, Mr. Finger’s Can You Feel It, not only doesn’t make me tear the CD out of the player, instead I now find myself return­ing to the way John Daly has turned the raw acid growl into a soft 303 shuf­fle, thus accen­tu­at­ing the melody in this most beau­ti­ful of all elec­tronic record­ings, over and over again.

A suc­cess? Nah, I’d say it’s a fuck­ing triumph.

This mix, from Left­side Wob­ble, is a wor­thy way to check out the album. And if you feel your­self get­ting to pre­cious about remix­ing this stuff, remem­ber the spirit it was made in. Hell, even the grump­i­est forum on the inter­net, Deep House Pages, gave it a thumbs up.

Trax Re-Edit Flavours by Left­side Wobble

“There’s a great under­ground soul scene bub­bling with artists you may not have heard like … Paul Ran­dolph, among many oth­ers in [Detroit] …Ste­vie Wonder

Is it too fan-boi to say that I’m absolutely besot­ted with the recently released col­lec­tion of remixes of tracks from Paul Ran­dolph’s 2007 album, Lonely Eden? The orig­i­nal album was a won­der­ful, warm, jour­ney through organic Detroit soul, from this Techno second-waver (his cred­its go back to 1993 and he was a part of Carl Craig’s leg­endary Inner­zone Orches­tra).

A bass player and vocal­ist, I was a huge fan of his This Is… What It Is album on Moody­man’s Mahogani Music, an album (mini-album?) so deeply beau­ti­ful it defies words on screen.

When­ever I feel jaded by house music and it’s var­i­ous muta­tions, I put this mighty disc on and shiver a lit­tle again.

Released over a series of 12″ EPs across 2008 and 2009, the mixes on Echoes (Of Lonely Eden) mostly take me to this same place. The orig­i­nal long player was / is a lovely jazz edged soul album, full of killer deep urban grooves — the sort that only appear on inde­pen­dent labels now, as the majors seem to have for­got­ten about the music that drove the world for so many decades and made their empires what they are — but the remixes take these songs back to the place inhab­ited by that ear­lier mini album, and that remake of The Styl­is­tics’ Peo­ple Make The World Go Round, that Paul voiced so mov­ingly on the Inner­zone Orches­tra album in the late ‘90s.

Recloose, Deetron, Zed Bias, Charles Web­ster and oth­ers all pro­vide majes­ti­cally deep mixes but the stonker is the Under­ground Resis­tance mix, from Mark Flash, of GPS,  an epic and sad soldier’s bal­lad on the orig­i­nal album, dom­i­nated by stab­bing strings and a moun­tain­ous end­ing, now lifted into another eerie place alto­gether closer to the cen­tre of Detroit around 4am.

I toyed with post­ing a track, but, nah, buy it…

A dis­claimer: I was given this album by my good friend, Phillip Kelly, who was respon­si­ble (in col­lab­o­ra­tion with Simon Endres) for the art direc­tion, typog­ra­phy, lay­out, design and the fab­u­lous pho­tog­ra­phy (as seen above) on both this and the ear­lier Paul Ran­dolph releases..none of which, you can be assured, influ­enced my non-corruptible mind.

It was twenty years ago today…well not exactly today…but it was 20 years more less. It was some­time in August 1987 the musi­cal world moved quite sub­stan­tially on it’s axis, never to quite return to the same spot.

These anniver­saries seem to come around with an increas­ing fre­quency, it being my age I guess, and some of them are, for me at least, quite ter­ri­fy­ing in their impli­ca­tions. Take the photo and brief story in the Mojo Mag­a­zine from, I think, April, stat­ing that Sid Vicious, bless him, would have turned fifty in Feb­ru­ary of this year. Putting aside the fact that in our minds, well mine at least, Sid will always be that snotty, trag­i­cally tal­ent­less, but iconic, fig­ure, aged about 20. But that’s essen­tially a thirty year anniversary…clearly, despite the way I feel, I’m still not 18. The twenty year ones are bad enough…and yes, it was twenty years ago this month that Paul Oak­en­fold, Nicky Hol­loway, Danny Ram­pling and a cou­ple of oth­ers went to Ibiza and bought back, not imme­di­ately mind, but just soon enough, the sec­ond sum­mer of love and Acid House. And it was never the same. Well for most of us…but I’ll get to that.

I don’t like Acid House you may say, but that’s largely beside the point. What Oak­en­fold, et al, bought us was not just a four on the floor pill pop­ping party but a door smash­ing, throat grab­bing change of psy­che. House music didn’t arrive in 87, it was a year or so old, but when acid swept across the UK in 1988 and the rest of the west­ern world, the USA excepted, in the next year or two, it said, like 57, 67 and 77, musi­cally you can do any­thing again. It picked up the thing that punk, and post punk, had begun and ran with it…the flurry of we-can-do-it activ­ity after it was incredible…all those labels, and exper­i­menters, and its that we have to thank for smoth­er­ing the awful post Wham MTV friendly pop that the UK was obsessed with in 84 / 85 /86. Go West anyone?

With­out Ibiza 87, no Mas­sive Attack in the main­stream, no Bjork, no Acid Jazz, no Oasis and Brit­pop, no Daft Punk, no club cul­ture, no bloody Zoo TV Tour or Zooropa (I dis­like U2 with a vengeance but it’s had to argue that this was not their zenith, when they became more than just a big rock band), and no mid­dle class embrace of Pub­lic Enemy and Dr Dre. Hence Fat Freddy’s Drop are as much the child of Ibiza as any shitty wave yer hands in the air and fling yer glow­stick around trance DJ.

No Amer­ica never really quite got it. It still hasn’t. All of a sud­den the staid pre-adventurism of the pre-Beatles days returned to the USA. It closed its doors (out­side of per­haps NYC and the odd spark here and there which just empha­sis my point) to the future, hail­ing instead Nir­vana and grunge as the future. Now, they may have sold in West Auck­land, and panel-beater dress became chic for a week or two, but to most of us out­side the US, Cobain and co sounded so ridicu­lously old fash­ioned in 1989…like an updated Grand Funk Rail­road…and noth­ing has hap­pen­ing in main­stream rock’n’roll in Amer­ica since, except that by and large, now, it’s stopped selling.

That’s a surprise.

The irony in all this of course is that Black Amer­i­can music, be it hip-hop, house or techno, and the way the rest of the world related to it and used it’s con­cepts (which was the dif­fer­ence Ibiza and it’s after­math gave us), was dri­ving the rest of the world, it’s just that main­stream (and by that I mean white sadly in the still seg­re­gated US mass) Amer­ica missed that chap­ter and every one since.

And ain’t it ironic that Mr Wil­son picks this par­tic­u­lar month to shuf­fle away….