Summary: Deep Sessions VIII (Where America meets Europe) Foreword on the art: I found this little gem whilst looking for the better album cover for the set. This place in Iceland called Þingvellir is on the plate boundary of the tectonic plates of America and Europe. Both plates drifting apart leaving behind cracks in the surface, which are sometimes filled by water. From the inner geek in me, it was like sweet chocolate.. To see the pic in its entire beauty: https://www.flickr.com/photos/lichtmaedel/8528196516/ Deep Sessions VIII: where New York and Chicago meet Manchester and Berlin. Where left-brain meets right-brain. Where Grooves meets Technique. Where inner pain meets self sehnsucht. Back again, just when I thought I would give Deep a rest for the sake of the genre and my followers sanity !!J I was playing around with current tunes, trying to work out how to structure, build and put together a decent Deep House set. I was looking at what worked and what didn’t in the previous seven attempts. The thought occurred to me that I’d rather focus on why I love Deep, what brought me to the genre and why I always end up wanting and a tad frustrated with my results when tackling Deep. Now let’s delve into a LONG digression into my personal Journey into House, which will bring light to the whole Deep Sessions project: Deep House is intrinsically an American, East Coast, Detroit and Chicago sub-genre. At its best, it has distinct African-American roots. No one does it better.. There is an inherent sadness, groove, pain in the original Deep House tunes, which I am absolutely convinced could not have been found on the West coast nor dreamed up through a white male/female experience. Just as Blues (which I love as well) is well documented to have started with African-American slave songs but was later embraced by non-ethnic artists, Deep House just had to stem from “deep within” the African soul... But unlike Blues Deep has groove and funk.. Deep is my House first love. But House is definitively not where my musical journey started… As a teenager, I went from Progressive Rock to Electronica. Eventually I dipped into Techno, only to veer towards Balearic Trance. It is when I was still listening to Techno and Trance that I discovered Deep, with tracks that where at the congruence of deep and techno. If memory serves me right, it is whilst listening to Laurent Garnier and the whole techno Manchester crew that I first encountered House. Deep Tech House.. First US track I can recall listening to and eventually buying was Elements from Danny Tenaglia and some MK track I can’t recall.. Very far away from the soulful house I now love but very much in the vein of Techno.. With an immature hate of disco, I could never have found at the time any interest in funky or soulful house. But through Techno, Deep was the conduct I needed to finally encounter, discover African music and rhythm. Spoon-fed with classical and pop music, House could never have been my first love. From US Deep House, I started becoming interested in what was produced in Europe.. With the Global Underground label, some Perfecto tunes, Sasha, German Djs, Armand etc.. It all started to make sense! In Deep House, I could find a musical, emotional space, which would encompass both the electronica I had loved and the American House sound I was discovering. It was at around that time that I discovered C&M Productions and Truehouse. With their help, I never looked back.. They introduced me to the fifty shade of Deep, chill-house, soulful house and , god forbid for the disco hater I was, funky house! With them, the journey continued into progressive house and today we are all embarking into the nu-disco indie house journey. What C&M Productions and truehouse did was to bring all (continued)
