Collection: House

DAYBREAKERS, a new London based label focusing on the deepest of deep house, from classics to rarities, dubs, hits & b sides. First up for the label is a focus on Jeffrey Collins’ Music Station label from Englewood, New Jersey. Music Station was a staple on dancefloors across the USA in the 90s. This EP selects four of the best from the label. The A Side has Mixes of Elaine Monk’s - Something For Nothing, mixes so good we had to include them both. On the Flip, the Club Dub of Cherie Lee’s 'Love Me Or Leave Me' will keep the dancefloor rolling, and then B2 is the Smack Rain Vibe Mix of Gerideau’s Take A Stand', a deeper than deep anthem perfect for any discerning red lit basement full of dancers. Don't miss out, buy or cry.

London-based DJ and producer Steven Julien returns to his Apron Records imprint with a double A-side 12" , bringing together the new gospel and R&B-influenced EP TIME and previously digital-only EP Wraap't. Bridging sonic worlds together, from the soulful anthem TIME and the glossy rap hit ULTRA ft. James Massiah to the old-school house sound of UP and Julien's driving club remix of Wraap't ft. Fatima. Rounding off the EP with the instrumental BALLAD, a dreamy jazz-inspired excursion, further highlights the unique contrast of Steven Juliens' work. Available in two vinyl colours, limited Red and a classic black vinyl printed with the TIME EP artwork on the cover and Wraap't EP artwork on the inner sleeves. Two EPs, one record.

Volume 2 of this expertly curated project of 90s Italian House - put together by Don Carlos. If Paradise was half as nice… by Fabio De Luca. Googling “paradise house”, the first results to pop up are an endless list of European b&b’s with whitewashed lime façades, all of them promising “…an unmatched travel experience a few steps from the sea”. Next, a little further down, are the institutional websites of a few select semi-luxury retirement homes (no photos shown, but lots of stock images of smiling nurses with reassuring looks). To find the “paradise house” we’re after, we have to scroll even further down. Much further down. It feels like yesterday, and at the same time it seems like a million years ago. The Eighties had just ended, and it was still unclear what to expect from the Nineties. Mobile phones that were not the size of a briefcase and did not cost as much as a car? A frightening economic crisis? The guitar-rock revival?! Certainly, the best place to observe that moment of transition was the dancefloor. Truly epochal transformations were happening there. From America, within a short distance one from the other, two revolutionary new musical styles had arrived: the first one sounded a bit like an “on a budget” version of the best Seventies disco-music – Philly sound made with a set of piano-bar keyboards! – the other was even more sparse, futuristic and extraterrestrial. It was a music with a quite distinct “physical” component, which at the same time, to be fully grasped, seemed to call for the knotty theories of certain French post-modern philosophers: Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Paul Virilio... Both those genres – we would learn shortly after – were born in the black communities of Chicago and Detroit, although listening to those vinyl 12” (often wrapped in generic white covers, and with little indication in the label) you could not easily guess whether behind them there was a black boy from somewhere in the Usa, or a girl from Berlin, or a pale kid from a Cornish coastal town. Quickly, similar sounds began to show up from all corners of Europe. A thousand variations of the same intuition: leaner, less lean, happier, slightly less intoxicated, more broken, slower, faster, much faster... Boom! From the dancefloors – the London ones at least, whose chronicles we eagerly read every month in the pages of The Face and i-D – came tales of a new generation of clubbers who had completely stopped “dressing up” to go dancing; of hot tempered hooligans bursting into tears and hugging everyone under the strobe lights as the notes of Strings of Life rose up through the fumes of dry ice (certain “smiling” pills were also involved, sure). At this point, however, we must move on to Switzerland. In Switzerland, in the quiet and diligent town of Lugano, between the 1980s and 1990s there was a club called “Morandi”. Its hot night was on Wednesdays, when the audience also came from Milan, Como, Varese and Zurich. Legend goes that, one night, none less than Prince and Sheila E were spotted hiding among the sofas, on a day-off of the Italian dates of the Nude Tour… The Wednesday resident and superstar was an Italian dj with an exotic name: Don Carlos. The soundtrack he devised was a mixture of Chicago, Detroit, the most progressive R&B and certain forgotten classics of old disco music: practically, what the Paradise Garage in New York might have sounded like had it not closed in 1987. In between, Don Carlos also managed to squeeze in some tracks he had worked on in his studio on Lago Maggiore. One in particular: a track that was rather slow compared to the BPM in fashion at the time, but which was a perfect bridge between house and R&B. The title was Alone: Don Carlos would explain years later that it had to be intended both in the English meaning of “by itself” and like the Italian word meaning “halo”. That wasn’t the only double entendre about the song, anyway. Its own very deep nature was, indeed, double. On the one hand, Alone was built around an angelic keyboard pattern and a romantic piano riff that took you straight to heaven; on the other, it showcased enough electronic squelches (plus a sax part that sounded like it had been dissolved by acid rain) to pigeonhole the tune into the “junk modernity” section, aka the hallmark of all the most innovative sounds of the time: music that sounded like it was hand-crafted from the scraps of glittering overground pop. No one knows who was the first to call it “paradise house”, nor when it happened. Alternative definitions on the same topic one happened to hear included “ambient house”, “dream house”, “Mediterranean progressive”… but of course none were as good (and alluring) as “paradise house”. What is certain is that such inclination for sounds that were in equal measure angelic and neurotic, romantic and unaffective, quickly became the trademark of the second generation of Italian house. Music that seemed shyly equidistant from all the rhythmic and electronic revolutions that had happened up to that moment (“Music perfectly adept at going nowhere slowly” as noted by English journalist Craig McLean in a legendary field report for Blah Blah Blah magazine). Music that to a inattentive ear might have sounded as anonymous as a snapshot of a random group of passers-by at 10AM in the centre of any major city, but perfectly described the (slow) awakening in the real world after the universal love binge of the so-called Second Summer of Love. For a brief but unforgettable season, in Italy “paradise house” was the official soundtrack of interminable weekends spent inside the car, darting from one club to another, cutting the peninsula from North to centre, from East to West coast in pursuit of the latest after-hours disco, trading kilometres per hour with beats per minute: practically, a new New Year’s Eve every Friday and Saturday night. This too was no small transformation, as well as a shock for an adult Italy that was encountering for the first time – thanks to its sons and daughters – the wild side of industrial modernity. The clubbers of the so-called “fuoriorario” scene were the balls gone mad in the pinball machine most feared by newspapers, magazines and TV pundits. What they did each and every weekend, apart from going crazy to the sound of the current white labels, was linking distant geographical points and non-places (thank you Marc Augé!) – old dance halls, farmhouses and business centres – transformed for one night into house music heaven. As Marco D’Eramo wrote in his 1995 essay on Chicago, Il maiale e il grattacielo: “Four-wheeled capitalism distorts our age-old image of the city, it allows the suburbs to be connected to each other, whereas before they were connected only by the centre (…) It makes possible a metropolitan area without a metropolis, without a city centre, without downtown. The periphery is no longer a periphery of any centre, but is self-centred”. “Paradise house” perfectly understood all of this and turned it into a sort of cyber-blues that didn’t even need words, and unexpectedly brought back a drop of melancholic (post?)-humanity within a world that by then – as we would wholly realise in the decades to come – was fully inhuman and heartless. A world where we were all alone, and surrounded by a sinister yellowish halo, like a neon at the end of its life cycle. But, for one night at least, happy.

Vinyl debut for 3 tracks that have been seriously moving dance floors the past few months. Glenn explores his tech side on this one, with jazz stabs, heavy synths, and hard 909s on the A-side. The B-side's "Acid disc" is more chill, giving listeners a chance to cool down and catch their breath.

Originally released in 2014, Strut re-introduces Hardcore Traxx: Dance Mania Records 1986-1997, the highly sought-after definitive retrospective of one of Chicago’s most important and innovative house music labels. Emerging as a raw alternative to the powerhouses of Trax and DJ International during the mid-‘80s, Dance Mania continued to represent street-level Chicago club music into the ‘90s, helping to pioneer the Ghetto House sound. Hardcore Traxx traces the full story of the label from its heyday. Founded in 1985 and managed by Ray Barney, Dance Mania hit the ground running with its second release in ’86, the incendiaryHardcore Jazz EP by Duane & Co. Barney quickly became a trustworthy outlet for early house and acid productions by upcoming Chicago artists such as Lil Louis, Marshall Jefferson and Farley Keithaka Farkey “Jackmaster” Funk. The label set out its stall with a series of landmark Chicago releases including 7 Ways by Hercules, Li’l Louis’ The Original Video Clash, and international smash House Nation by Housemaster Boyz. During the ‘80s, it cemented its reputation for uncompromising club records and DJ Tools with sounds spanning raw garage (Victor Romeo’s Love Will Find A Way), acid trax (Robert Armani) and quality house (Da Posse). Into the ‘90s, Barney unleashed the groundbreaking "Hit It From The Back" by Traxmen and Eric Martin, ushering in a primitive new sound around faster, stripped down rhythms and X-rated party-starting lyric lines. Barney remembers, “Guys used to call in and ask for music on Dance Mania – they were saying, ‘gimme some of that ghetto stuff.’ Dance Mania producer DJ Slugo adds, “when we made Ghetto House… we made music for the bitches. Music for the grinding sh*t and all of that.” The sound spawned a whole new swathe of homegrown producers releasing a fast flow of no-compromise dancefloor bangers: Paul Johnson, DJ Deeon, DJ Funk, DJ Milton, Waxmaster and Slugo all became leaders of the scene. The influence of ghetto house became widespread, not least for Daft Punk, whose track "Teachers" from their Homework album in 1997 was effectively a tribute to Dance Mania. The new wave of productions also paved the way for the later Chicago juke and footwork scene. Today, with the label back up and running courtesy of Ray Barney and Parris Mitchell, Dance Mania remains a revered Chicago institution across dance music. With Hardcore Traxx, Strut traces the history of the label on a definitive compilation for the first time, from the early classics to ghetto house anthems alongside big money rarities and oddities hidden within their substantial catalogue. Produced in association with Dance Mania, the release is compiled by Conor Keeling (DJ behind the popular "Teachers" Daft Punk influences online mix) with help from Miles Simpson of Ransom Note. Physical formats feature full label history and artist interviews by DJ Chrissy Murderbot alongside rare photos.

We Play House Recordings label boss Red D is back on his Red Basics solo outlet with more lo fi rawness, this time taking cues from spoken word deep house legends like Blake Baxter and Mike Dunn. Opener ‘The J Principle’ pairs seductive lyrics by the enigmatic Max Erotic with pure electronic house funk to make any soul melt. After this there’s no time to rest when ‘Raw Shit’ comes along with its wicked off-kilter groove spiced up with dirty lyrics and chord stabs to shake up those late night floors. On the flip side it’s all about Red D’s love for the 313 with a slamming oldskool Detroit techno track aptly called ‘Troisentrois Groove’. Basics were rarely this fundamental.

first SOUND SIGNATURE release in quite some time brings us 4 sparkling tracks from Ohio's much in demand HANNA who's also a member of Theo Parrish's Rotating Assembly. expect his trademark lush and often bitter-sweet jazz-schooled textures underpinned by bumping, skipping beats. wonderful record!

HOUSEWAX presents the Don of Bari-House, Mr. Nico Lahs! We are very happy to present you our long time Fratello and great producer with this fantastic new release, which will hit the stores in March! Highly recommended!

Athens-based label Ethos is looking to build on the good start it made with its first two outings with a third raw and direct EP. DimDJ is a legend in Greece and has been since the 90s when he first began making his mark. His sound is not all about nostalgia though - he opens his Welcome To This World EP with 'This Little Face' which is a deep house reverie with painterly pads smeared over dusty drums. Nice analogue textures make it all the more lived in and a Beatless version strips away everything but the suspensory synths. 'Welcome To This World is another lo-fi and crackly deep house meditation and 'Hyper Tonic' flips the script with some undulating acid lines, more light synth work and hissing hi-hats.

Laseech is proud to announce the release of "I Saw You", a soulful and versatile 12” debut on his newly established label, Cosada. The release features the emotive voice of Swaylo, whose performance complements Laseech’s signature jazzy and soulful sound. Adding to the record’s prestige, "I Saw You" includes a remix by none other than Ron Trent, bringing his deep, mystical style to the release, further solidifying it as an essential record for house music lovers. A Dub mix is also included, designed to bring fresh broken beat energy to the dance floor or more intimate, reflective moments. This marks an exciting chapter for Laseech and Cosada, a label inspired by and named after a serene island of the Adriatic and the street of Laseech’s studio where the magic happens.

Four exclusive, unreleased tracks lifted from the forthcoming 'Eglo Records Volume 3' compilation,available on a limited edition 12" vinyl EP to celebrate 15 years of our trend setting, little independent label, born out of the basement of the legendary Plastic People night club. Featuring the don Zed Bias on the remix for Chunky's 'Dancing On Tables' alongside fellow Mancunian talent Metrodome, as well as Liverpools young Broken Beat wizard Sticky Dub, who serves up a deep, brukwise bubbler on 'Minerals'. Flip it over for brand new material from House music aficionado Giles Smith (formerly of Secret Sundaze) and the official debut release form label boss Alex Nut onhis lo-fi Electro House jawn 'Arcade Fun Pt.1' .The full compilation will be out in April featuring new tracks and previously released material fromthe likes of label artists Shy One, Steve Spacek, Stefan Ringer, Last Nubian, Malik Hendricks,Fatima, Destiny71z, Natalie Slade and many more....

Osunlade returns with Inner Garden on his Yoruba label, blending organic rhythms, electronic grooves, and soulful vibrations.

Label head honcho Jovonn returns to Body N'Deep with the 'I Am Music EP', giving you a taster of what to expect from his forthcoming album due in 2025. Three quality deep house inspired tracks from NYC's finest!

After the iconic Musica da Discoteca series, l’oggetto returns with DANCE, a new 12” continuing his exploration of the rooted electronic music interplay between his native Italy and his adopted home, the US. With his signature deep vibes and iconoclastic style, these four new tracks deliver a sonic journey through oblique electronic textures: raw and sharp yet smooth and uplifting; leftfield and trippy, percussive and bouncy, hypnotic and transcendental. l’oggetto is the moniker of NY-based Italian multidisciplinary artist Marco Scozzaro. With roots in the Italian hardcore/punk subcultures of the ’90s, he quickly embraced electronic music production and club culture. True to his DIY ethos, in 2020 he co-founded MKDF Records to release and distribute his uncompromising sound.

After the success of Volume One, Jamie 3:26 returns for the second volume in the Dancefloor Damage series! Personal exclusives from his collection, these have damaged dancefloors around the world for years and are now available on vinyl for the first time ever. From the Southside of Chicago to the world. Three killer disco classics re-worked by a legend. No one does it like Jamie! Buy or cry.