Label / Mule Musiq
Cat # / MULEMUSIQ CD07
Released / January 2009
Style / Deep House
Rating / 4.5 of 5
[Note from editor: should have gotten 5]

2008 saw an awful lot of looking back in the world of dance music, with many artists offering revisitations and re-presentations of various "classic" sounds, such as disco, dub techno and deep house. Japanese label Mule proved itself to be prescient indeed in predicting the third of these trends when it released You? Again? halfway through 2006, an outstanding collection of lush deep house tracks originally produced and released by Terre Thaemlitz in the 1990s and early 2000s. Now, the fiercely experimental and intellectual producer returns to the sound with Midtown 120 Blues, his first full-length album under the DJ Sprinkles moniker.

This is, however, most definitely not Thaemlitz cashing in. He is deeply suspicious of the deep house revival, and in many ways Midtown 120 Blues is an attempt to make us question what we think deep house "means" and to draw our attention to the contexts that formed the sound. In a moment of delicious irony, Thaemlitz lays it out on album opener "Midtown 120 Intro" with a coolly delivered voice-over that deliberately evokes scores of classic house monologues.

There must be a hundred records with voice-overs asking, "What is house?" The answer is always some greeting card bullshit about "life, love, happiness" ... House is not universal. House is hyper-specific ... The contexts from which the deep house sound emerged are forgotten: sexual and gender crises, transgendered sex work, black market hormones, drug and alcohol addiction, loneliness, racism, HIV, ACT-UP, Tompkins Square Park, police brutality, queer-bashing, underpayment, unemployment and censorship - all at 120 beats per minute.

There's a definite twinge of melancholy here too. For Thaemlitz, deep house is not the music of celebration, but the music of sadness. Perhaps this is sadness for the original context that has been erased, buried and gentrified. Perhaps it's the sadness of the original context itself. Perhaps it's a mix of both. This melancholy is clearest on "Grand Central, Pt. II (72 hrs. by Rail from Missouri)," almost nine minutes of gently drifting ambience, as a piano softly dances over warm gentle tones, the sound of a record crackling and popping, and a woman's voice reflecting on seeing somebody "getting knocked around." The final minute is silent except for the sound of vinyl crackling. More than anywhere else on the album, this track underlines what deep house means to Thaemlitz - sadness, pain, the threat of sudden violence and the fleeting promise of escape in a club.

Midtown 120 Blues is an incredibly deep album - not just in terms of the "deepness" of the house on offer, but emotionally and intellectually so, as Thaemlitz maps out the sound in a deeply personal way. A meditation on the "meaning" of house, a critique of the recent deep house revival, an exploration of one man's personal relationship with the sound - Midtown 120 Blues is all of these things, not to mention being some of the best deep house you'll hear in a very long time.

Tracklist
01. Midtown 120 Intro
02. Midtown 120 Blues
03. Ball'r (Madonna-Free Zone)
04. Brenda's $20 Dilemma
05. House Music is Controllable Desire You Can Own
06. Sisters, I Don't Know What This World Is Coming To
07. Reverse Rotation
08. Grand Central, Pt. I (Deep into the Bowel of House)
09. Grand Central, Pt. II (72 hrs. by Rail from Missouri)
10. The Occasional Feel-Good