VA - EPM selects Chicago House

EPM Selects Chicago House, and what a selection it is. London based DJ agency, promotions team and record label EPM share with us some of the most delectable moments of Chicago house with their new release. With so many house compilations gone before you can’t help ask, 'do we need another one?' - if it’s as well put together as this one, then yes, we do.  

The sheer range of artists on this compilation reassures you that much love and thought has gone into the selections with something here for all the house heads, young and old. The 80's classics sit side by side with lesser-known gems that never received the kudos of tracks like Move your Body , but are still, as important to the evolution of the house sound of the windy city.

Anthems Love Can’t Turn Around and Move Your Body kick things off, easing you into that warehouse party mood. Just as you recall all the places you first heard them, Ron Trent serves up his signature deep house with I Feel The Rhythm. The mechanised beats juxtapose with layered synth melodies and intermittent vocal samples - it’s unpolished, and therein lays its beauty. In a world of too often over-produced, sound-alike presets, this shows how the founding fathers did it without copying each other.
  
The dirtier side of Chicago house is represented too with a sprinkling of hip house. Armando’s '100% of Disin’ you' is pure jacking goodness, and his cut ' 151' is pure acid, with a synth line that seeps through the filters bit by bit, disappearing into a black hole, and emerging twice as powerful. If anything on this album deserves to be listened to at maximum Db, this is it.

Further in we hear the sounds of Chicago in the noughties with Gene Farris’ Black Satin given the West Coast treatment as Miguel Migs uses the remix to bring the original vocals and piano more into play. The twinkling Rhodes and uplifting vocal lighten the mood, taking things out of the warehouse and onto the sun terraces. And of course, no Chicago compilation is complete without Larry Heard’s AKA Mr Fingers’ timeless offering ' Can you Feel It' possessing the most famous bassline in house and a vocal sermon delivered with such aplomb and conviction, it feels like house music is the religion and the club the church.

So with that in mind, I say to you brothers and sisters of DT, we should give praise to the mighty machines of Roland. Without them we may never have experienced, the inimitable sounds displayed on this album, that of the Juno’s, 303’s, 909’s and 808’s. Where would that leave us? In a sonic wasteland brothers and sisters. With Roland, and their beautiful machines, the world is a better and much happier, lively place.