PRETTYGOODTIME

Late Reply in full, and Meteors keeps climbing

Side Door put the whole of Late Reply up this morning, so you can bin the two minute preview from August. Three and a half minutes, and the drop I kept going on about lands at 2:43 if you want to skip ahead. I would not skip ahead.

streaming only, no download on this one

The other bit of news is that Meteors has been sitting in the Hype Machine charts for nineteen days now, which for a label this size is a genuinely daft number. Ellis Wake was playing to about forty people in a basement in March.

heart it if you have an account over there

Posted by J. at 10:18 AM · 23 comments · Labels: deep house, side door, cass verano, ellis wake

My jam this week

No review today. Three weeks on and the Pool Lights twelve has not left the deck, so that is that. The site only lets you pick one song at a time and mine is eight minutes long, which feels like cheating. It runs out on Friday and then I have to choose again, which is the whole point of it.

thisismyjam.com/sundayswim

It is the bit around five minutes, when the strings turn up and nothing else changes. I am eighteen again, stood near a speaker, being slightly too into it.

Posted by J. at 8:31 AM · 9 comments · Labels: this is my jam, pool lights, free entry

Want You Around was the song of the summer and nobody noticed

The heating came on in this flat last night, which is the only calendar I trust, so the summer is over and I want to say something about the record that won it. It was Julien Marsh, Want You Around, and if you go looking for evidence that it won anything you will not find a scrap.

Here is what I have instead. I heard it in a basement in Rotterdam at the end of June. I heard it out of somebody's phone at a barbecue in July, badly, and it still worked. I heard it twice in one night in a bar that does not play house music and does not want to. Every DJ I know had it in the bag by the middle of the summer, and not one of them could tell me where they got it, which is normally the sign that a record has stopped belonging to anybody.

And then you look it up. Eleven days on the Hype Machine chart for Meteors, which deserved every one of them. A hundred posts for the Cass Verano previews. For Want You Around: three hundred and eleven plays on the label's page, the lowest of the three tracks on its own record, and one blog post in the entire summer, which was mine, in June, where it shares the headline with two other names and gets four sentences.

That is the whole mechanism and it took me until September to see it. A record needs a second reason to be written about. A single gets a premiere and then a remix and then a chart position, three separate days somebody has to type its name. Want You Around is A1 on a various-artists sampler. Every blog covered FRE037 once, in a roundup, and after that we had all done it. There was no second day. The thing was enormous in rooms and invisible in the only place that counts these things, and the charts only know what got posted.

I wanted to put the real numbers here and my own stats table has been face down since August, so you will have to take the label's word and mine. Here it is again, on its own, with its own headline, three months late. The bassline and the vocal trading bars for six minutes, and neither of them giving way.

Marsh has not put anything out since. I emailed the label twice and got a very nice reply the second time that did not answer the question. If he turns up on FRE041 I will be the first one here about it, and this time he gets the whole post.

Posted by J. at 9:12 AM · 64 comments · Labels: deep house, free entry, julien marsh

The piano player gets her own record: Rae Duval, Piano Weather EP (SDR002)

Quick bit of housekeeping from the Cloakroom post in August. The piano on Keep It Coming, the one I gave the stamp to and then went on about for a paragraph, is not Cass Verano. It is Rae Duval, who was booked for an afternoon of overdubs and ended up writing half the track. Side Door have given her SDR002, which is the correct outcome.

Piano Weather is the same trick as the Verano track, played by the person who invented it, and it goes further: five minutes, and the piano never once behaves. The dub sits right behind it on the A-side with the drums pulled back and the chords left alone in a room, which is the one I will still be playing in November. Flip it over for Piano in the Dark, the sad one, and it is very good at being the sad one.

Out at the end of the month.

Posted by J. at 2:26 PM · 38 comments · Labels: deep house, side door, rae duval, cass verano

Pool Lights stretches out: Midnight Disco Pulse (FRE040)

I went on at some length about Pool Lights back in June, mostly because nobody else seemed to have noticed them on the FRE037 sampler. Free Entry noticed. They get the next catalogue number all to themselves, and rather than a tidy four minute edit they have handed in eight minutes of disco with the strings left in.

full stream up all week, 12" ships the 20th

It takes its time, which is the point. Two and a half minutes before the bassline turns up, the strings arrive somewhere around five, and by seven you have forgotten it was ever a record and not just a room you are standing in. Ezra Coble's Turning Tides on FRE039 did the long thing too, so this looks like a direction rather than an accident.

Posted by J. at 6:44 PM · 27 comments · Labels: deep house, free entry, pool lights, disco

Elias Hovden, Wish You Would (LWK004), and a note about the sleeves

Long Weekend are four people in Malmö who put out four records a year and have never once explained themselves. Everything ships in the same printed bag: grey-blue paper, a blue disc, an orange square in the bottom right where the shop sticker goes. I assumed for two years it was just a nice bit of design. It is not. The disc and the square are the cover photograph with everything else taken away, and the photograph is on the inner sleeve where you only find it after you have paid.

The rule, as far as I can work out from three releases: one photograph, one object somebody left behind, and the warm thing in the frame has to sit where that orange square is. LWK004 breaks it, and breaks it for a good reason.

Hovden has one trick and it is a good one. He finds a soul record, leaves the singer at her own pitch, and loops four bars of her until you stop hearing a sample and start hearing somebody in the room telling you something. No sped-up business, no chipmunk edits, which around here counts as a position. Under it, a bassline that never once gets out of the way. The build runs long and stays low, almost annoyingly so, and then the drop arrives and does the whole job in one go.

two inner sleeves this time, one per version

Two versions, so two photographs, shot the same weekend by the same person. The A-side gets the chair: white plastic, standing in two centimetres of water on a flooded pool deck, red towel over the back, someone gone home in a hurry. The flip gets a dead pine on the moor ten kilometres inland, snapped in the same storm, orange heartwood pointing at a flat grey sky. Chair, then no chair. I have been staring at the pair of them all week.

The flip is Ellis Wake, which is the bit that made me sit up, because he is a Free Entry artist and Free Entry do not lend people out. Both labels said yes to me putting it up, so it is above, and it is seven minutes long. He takes the same vocal, stretches it wide over arpeggios and then sits on his hands for four minutes, which on a first listen I mistook for the track not going anywhere. It goes somewhere. The lift arrives around five and a half and I have played it back more times than the A-side. Digital lands in September, vinyl when it lands.

Posted by J. at 11:47 AM · 31 comments · Labels: deep house, long weekend, elias hovden, premiere

Preview: Cass Verano, Cloakroom EP (SDR001)

Side Door is new, a Free Entry offshoot for the blunter end of the catalogue. SDR001 is Cass Verano, a name I had never seen until three weeks ago, and I have played all three of these out since Friday. Two-minute previews below, since that's all they've given anyone.

The stamp doesn't come out often. Keep It Coming earns it: the riff lands about a minute in and stays there for the rest of the track, played a hair ahead of the grid like somebody's actually sat at the thing. Rush Hour opens the record and does the heavy lifting, chopped tight and rolling. Late Reply swings the drums and holds its vocal back until the last drop. Three tracks, three keepers. Buy it when it lands.

Posted by J. at 4:02 PM · 52 comments · Labels: deep house, side door, cass verano, preview

Ellis Wake, Meteors EP (FRE038)

Three weeks after the sampler, Free Entry hands FRE038 to Ellis Wake, the one act from the FRE037 orbit with a whole EP of their own. After one listen you get why. This sits closest to the Cove Runner end of the roster: melodic, a little starry-eyed, with drums that keep working the whole way through.

"I wrote all three in the same week. It was the week of the August meteor showers, which felt like either a sign or a very good coincidence."

The title track is the anthem. Every Time We Talk is the one that'll end up in everybody's June mixes, all skippy garage swing, with the vocal sample answering the Rhodes like a phone call you're glad to be on. Wait For Me saves its sample for the last drop and earns it. My EP of the summer so far.

Posted by J. at 11:47 PM · 31 comments · Labels: deep house, free entry, ellis wake

Premiere: Free Entry rounds up three new names on FRE037

Free Entry has quietly had the best batting average in deep house for two years running, and the new one is a sampler. Three names you don't know yet, one lane of the Free Entry sound each. Best thing they've put out since the Delmar run of '12.

The house style is intact. Kicks that actually land, basslines pushed way up front, and those sped-up R&B vocals, real sung lines looped until they mean something different than they used to. Warm and easy to dance to. You know the drill by now.

Marsh does the label's signature move on A1, where the chop trades bars with the bassline like they rehearsed it. Pool Lights goes full strut, disco strings and all. Pier 4 closes the A-side quiet and lovely. No word on a vinyl pressing. The usual digital outlets get it end of the month.

Posted by J. at 9:14 AM · 14 comments · Labels: deep house, free entry, premiere