Detroit Warehouse

Detroit Warehouse

I moved back to Chicago after my undergraduate years in Southern Indiana at Indiana University, and my roommate and partner in all things philosophical Scott moved to Detroit where he discovered the Detroit warehouse party scene that I had been traveling to since 1991, especially for Richie Hawtin's Packard Plant parties. I even wrote a Cheesy article about going up there for the techno scene for the student newspaper. Hopefully that thing has not been archived somewhere. I was quite proud of how "underground" I was.  We left Bloomington, Indiana in 1995 with our totally useless degrees in Religious Studies and Philosophy. Scott got way more into the Detroit scene than I ever did. While I was going to underground parties in Chicago, he was busy ensconcing himself in all things Detroit. The turning point for him was seeing DJ Bone blowing minds at an abandoned building with stolen electricity "somewhere in Detroit," and then visiting Submerge to spend what very little money he had on Underground Resistance records, which explains the heavy presence of UR on this mix. Thankfully, the first time that he went shopping, Mike Banks was there to help him spend his money right.  For me, it was DJ Hyperactive showing me what to buy at a record store on the Southside of Chicago that I can't remember the name of right now, but it wasn't Gramophone, which is on the Northside and where fellow IU grad Miles Maeda worked. I bought most of my records from Gramophone over the years, but Hyperactive showed me the actual tracks that I had been hearing so many DeeJay's from Chicago and Detroit playing, which included: Jeff Mills, Robert Hood, Juan Atkins, and all of the German techno stuff, mostly Tresor records, that appear on this mix. At Gramophone Josh Werner and Justin Long picked out most of what I bought in the 90s. I once went to a party when I was at IU where Miles Maeda was spinning, and he was playing a lot of Detroit stuff, as did Hyperactive when he spun or made mixtape. I specifically remember hearing Derrick May, Juan Atkins, and Aux 88 for the first time at that IU party, and this taught me that whatever beef there supposedly was between Detroit and Chicago, it wasn't very deep.  1. Convextion, Miranda: This one tickles the brain into a remembrance of forgotten dimensions of the body. This was one of the first records that Mike Banks handed to Scott when he politely asked for some help from the Underground Resistance gentlemen gathered that day at Submerge back in 96. 2. Thomas Barrett, Re-synthesized: Pure UR madness. It builds and builds without a breakdown or a break of any kind. We're just marching the f--- forward into the post-industrial collapse of the the lost future. Get in line or get lost. 3. Psychofuk, Pyschofuk: I really don't know what this is, other than it was one of the records that Mike Banks gave to Scott. Oddly it's on Strictly Rhythm, which is a New York label that isn't associated with this sort of synthesized psychosis. Scott didn't know who Mike Banks was at the time, but he wisely bought whatever Mike put in his hands. Whatever "Psychofuk" is, it is properly named because it has the correct affect that "Hi-Tek" funk should on one's psychology. This is another deep, ecstatic brain tickler that let's you know that there are other, vast realms within reach if one posses the right esoteric technics for calling the far near. 4. Basic Channel, Phylps Track 11/11: Scott and I had a Hyperactive mixtape with it on it, and we use to call it the "Train Song," until Mike Banks, unbeknownst to him, showed Scott what it actually was. German Dub Techno was the perfect combination of groovy and electronic. A synthesizer manipulates and amplifies electricity. Human bodies are run on electro-chemical grooves. German Dub Tech Scientists were able to put electricity into these enchanted kinds of body grooves because of their past experiments with "Electric Body Music" and Dub Reggae. They then ran the whole tincture through an echo chamber, and this is what came out. Play it loudly on a good sound system. 5. Sender Berlin, Sendersuchlauf: Trust the Germans with their electronic dub machines. They understand post industrial collapse and the weird, wonderful noises that it makes. They loop these sounds and run them through strange filters, and then they slam a four on the floor bass apocalypse down, which really ties the room together. You'll love it. 6. Juan Atkins, Session 1: The Originator! German and Detroit have had an uncanny connection from the begging of this electronic music thing. Kraftwerk and Can got electronic noises moving towards body movement in the 70's. And then the Electrifying Mojo introduced Detroiters to both German synth music and Italio-disco in the late 70s / early 80s. Juan Atkins had no idea how his music was being regarded in Europe in the early 80s, but it was regarded and highly so. Germans have enthusiastically followed Detroit's techno output ever since. Juan took a class in high school about "Futurism," and then he bought the proper machinery to create the Future's soundtrack. 7. I think this track is called "One Sparkle" by Fumiya Tanaka: I remember it being on a Tresor compilation of some kind, but I can't find it right now. It sounds like a Jeff Mills track to me. The Japanese loved Detroit techno too, and I love this track's eerie, driving vibe. On the high end, there is like a metallic signal, sort of in the neighborhood of the sound on Mill's "Alarm." It makes me feel like there's a ship lost at sea in a storm ringing its warped, liquid-metal bell for help. But when you get there, its a massive 1950's fly saucer, and it ripples with the aquiferous music of the raging sea, as if it and the sea had always sung like that to each other. 8. Luke Slater (Planetary Assault Systems), Dungeon: I have no idea why Luke Slater called this track "Dungeon," but those are not the vibes that it gives to me, unless we're talking about the famous Tesor club in Berlin that in many ways resembled a dungeon because it was in the basement of what had been a fallout shelter in East Berlin. But Slater is an Englishman from Reading who definitely spun in some pretty dank place, including Tresor. This track sounds like some very esoteric alien creed with those staccato, metallic xylophone loops. And then there are those Kraftwerk Autobahn rushes employing the doppler effect to its proper ends. 9. Sender Berlin, Tragerfrequenz: Yes, twice. I'm just now realizing that I don't really know anything about Sender Berlin, except that they're German and on Tresor's record label, which is how I first heard them. This one is like an accidentally overheard, alien chant. When alien's get together for spell casting, it sounds like bouncing fuzz.  10. Octave One, Eniac: The track is named after the world's first electronic, general-purpose digital computer, and the Burden Brothers of Octave One are the artists. Octave One are a perfect example of Underground Resistance's combining of funk, jazz, and technology. This track sounds like the sort of trains of the future that we were promised but never materialized. Detroit is famous for having a monorail that runs around its downtown, which very few people ever ride because it really doesn't go anywhere useful. It was a particularly odd sight in the 90s before any of the revitalization efforts began in the downtown area. It just continually ran around a decrepit city scape providing a haunting contrast between the Detroit of the past and its seemingly cancelled future. 11. Daniel Bell: Science Fiction. This was a short but very cool phase in Daniel Bell's career in which he made bleep and boop techno. I love the 1960 Sci-fi vibes. Bell takes us to a clandestine laboratory of officially banned but secretly performed experiments with this one. Someone is trying to revivify something awful, and it's working. Just keep turning those knobs and let's see what happens. 12: DHS, House of God (Surgeon remix): I heard Hyperactive playing this one a lot. I had, like most people who grew up on sample-based, electronic music, heard the original and loved it. The "Industrial" music on "Waxtrax," sometimes called "Electric Body Music," and the Italo disco that a lot of Chicago DeeJay's played around the time "House" officially became a thing, were much more influential on House than is sometimes admitted. Italo disco, from when it was first embraced by Chicago on Georgio Moroder's mix of Donna Summer's 1977 "I Feel Love," continued to have a huge presence there long past Chicago's infamous disco demolition. 80s Industrial was comprised of early drum machines, synth loops, and samplers. Its machinic dance beats were overlaid by obscure dialogues and sound effects from b movies. 13. Joey Beltram, Ten Four: Some say that Joey Beltram's "Energy Flash" was the first true techno track. Who can make the final call about such arbitrary things? This track erupts with all the intense, industrial energy that Beltram was known for. It sort of sounds like a cult of clapping monks getting swept up in the enthusiasm of their daily worship service to electrical storms.  14. Jeff Mills, Alarm: The "Wizard" is definitely one of the best to ever do it. This specific warped alarm sound used to make the warehouse dancers giddy with joy. And the shaking tambourine loops got everyone feeling as ecstatic as the Hare Krishna's jumping around with their finger cymbals. I got to see him again a few months ago. He's still the Wizard, but sounds systems aren't what they used to be.   https://www.martinessig.com [https://www.martinessig.com] Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co [http://jamesreeves.co] for the intro and outro music of most episodes, I mix the mixtapes that I post here.

Out of Darkness: What Is Otherness?

What is Otherness? Out of Darkness 2022 directed by Andrew Cumming fits into a number of horror categories, but we've decided to do it on our nature horror series. When we were kids back in the 80s, there were two bizarro movies about early hominids, "Quest for Fire" and the "Clan of the Cave Bear." Both have proved to be quite incompatible with more recent paleo-anthropological findings. Many of those fallacies have been cleared up to great effect in Out of Darkness. The two most glaring of these mistakes were that Neanderthals weren't capable of the advanced symbolic behaviors of Homo Sapiens, and that there was no interbreeding between Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals because they were too genetically different to reproduce. Since that time, archeological evidence has shown that Neanderthals did participate in symbolic activities such as art, language, and religious practices, and genetic markers have proved that they did interbreed with Homo Sapiens. Out of Darkness is a story about human immigration and confrontation with the Other, and in true horror fashion, it asks who is the monster when otherness is encountered? As different as Neanderthals were, they were human. https://youtu.be/AXgrppWd5Vs https://www.buzzsprout.com/2509184/episodes/19245677 https://www.martinessig.com [https://www.martinessig.com] Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co [http://jamesreeves.co] for the intro and outro music of most episodes, I mix the mixtapes that I post here.

Warehouse Parties: Three Decades Later

In this episode we explore the sort of house music that I and other deejays played at the warehouse parties of the 90s in Chicago. I recently mixed again with my original equipment from way back when in the 90s at a warehouse party for old people hosted by my friend "Chicago Tommy" at his company's warehouse. We painted, thanks to Tommy's homemade easels and canvases, and danced, and ate, thanks to everyone who brought a dish to share, and it was all over around 9PM because while our spirits are still youthful and in my case more free than when I was in my 20s in the 90s, we're old now. Thanks to James R for helping me to get this posted. He's been getting me acclimated to the world of modern technology for a couple of years now, and much to everyone's chagrin is the main reason that I have a website for my writing and podcasts and stuff like that. I redid the mix to be more to my liking from the party at which I was pretty rusty and didn't hold together some of the tracks as well as I would have liked. I don't have the modern mixing equipment that matches the beat for you, so I had to do it manually, as we did back in the day. This is a continuous mix, so there are no track breaks, but here is what I remember of what I mixed plus some other tracks as well: 1. I love this first track so much, it's a remix of the Fleetwood Mac song "Sarah." I think it was done by this dude who calls himself "Doctor Soul." He ran it through all kinds of filters and effects to make Stevie Nicks extra dreamy, and then sped it up and gave it that "four on the floor" house beat that gives the body the universal signal to move. 2. I heard this one really early in my warehouse party days because it was very popular in Chicago. It was a "French house filter track," as we used to say, by DJ. Gregory called "Sunshine People," I think the sample is from Chic. This version is from Darrio D Attis. 3. This sample, which I always called "Street Life," because that's the name of the Crusaders song that it was taken from, was super popular in Chicago. I think that I first heard Derrick Carter playing the version by Cricco Castelli. Everyone used to go crazy when that organ stab started to play and loop in joyful circles. This version is from Purple Disco Machine who is this Turkish German guy, if I understand correctly. 4. This song is called "Soul Power," by Full Intention. It's a good example of "Gospel house." The four on the floor beat of house music is from Gospel music. It's like when people start catching the Holy Ghost, and the organist is slamming all four bass pedals to the floor like she's banging out a bass rhythm, but there's a lot of disco elements in this song too, like the staccato string stabs and bubbly rhythm sounds. Full Intention have been around since the beginning. 5. I just call this next track "chucking" because it sounds like the disco chucking on guitar that Nile Rodgers used to do. It's from another Turkish German guy who's been around forever called "Mousse T."  6. This one was called "Ron Hardy's Revenge" after a famous saying by Ron Hardy that house music was disco's revenge. This contains a now very popular sample that Ron Hardy used to play over tracks that he was spinning. It's a Disco Diva, maybe Loleatta Holloway or Evelyn King or Thelma Houston or Norma Jean Wright giving a speech about resilience in the face of adversity. I always forget who this is, and it's hard to figure out a good way to search for it, but Ron Hardy (RIP) definitely invented playing an inspirational a cappella track over a beat. 7. I call this one "Jack Chicago," and I know very little about it. But it's full of fun, filter builds and horn stabs and a great sample of someone saying "jack Chicago," and "He's really the only one for me." It like a super badass, radio advertisement for Chicago house music. 8. This one is super disco-y. The sample is people saying "Break down the door," I think, which sounds like some super awesome disco emergency in which you have to get into the club to "dance your ass off," as Sal Soul used to say. 9. This one is Nick Holder, and it's called "Paradise." I really love the disco dance floor peaks and swells in this one. Holder takes us all to Paradise here, especially with those high pitched synth chirps that sound like the birds of paradise or angels calling us to a tropical heaven. 10. I call this one "keep on trucking" because that was a popular saying in the 70s, and this track sounds like a disco trucker rolling down the highway, but then there are these awesome deep strings making it sound like that "Disco Fever" track that I remember from the double album from the movie soundtrack that my parents had, which was called something like "Journey to Disco Mountain." I used to beg my mother to play that disco mountain song because that was one disco peak I yearned to scale over and over again in 1978. Whatever else is going on in this song, it almost sounds kind of country too, like that "Devil Went Down to George" song, which I also begged my mother to play over and over again in 1978. Fiddle battles between the Oakridge Boys and the Devil were pretty epic. 11. This is an Ian Pooley track, who is my favorite German producer and deejay. This one feels like a swirling, Latin rumba or something. I saw Ian once at the Detroit Movement festival a long time ago, and he seemed to raise his larger to me as I would lose my mind to each new groove that he mixed into. When Germans raise their steins to you, it means, "Respect, bro, thank you for acting like an out of control loser when play my tunes. It means a lot to me since I've come all the way here to Detroit from the far away land of the German people." 12. I only know that this one has a Sister Sledge sample in it, and it might be called "Disco Tools." It's so fun, and what a great build to a tremendous disco eruption!  13. This one is Karizma, and it was a very popular gospel house track maybe a decade ago or so. The sample is from a classic gospel song, which I don't know the name of, but the lead singer and the choir are singing about having bills due and how God is going to "Work It Out." James Baldwin wrote in his classic "Go Tell It on the Mountain," that when the church music hits you, there is no question of doubt, you're just fully ensconced in belief. We all need a few moments of full on religious psychosis on a daily basis, especially when bills are due and there isn't much in the bank, because somebody's got to work that out. https://www.martinessig.com [https://www.martinessig.com] Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co [http://jamesreeves.co] for the intro and outro music of most episodes, I mix the mixtapes that I post here.

Hermeneutic Circles: Annihilation

Here is another example of Hermeneutic circles in action. Annihilation, both the book and the movie, are like David Tracy's "Classics" to me because they provide an inexhaustible wealth of possible interpretations, especially because they both deal so strongly with the ambiguity of identity, including the ambiguity of the apparently determinate nature of our genetic inheritance. My partner Char and I have a horror podcast in which this episode first appeared that deals with ideas around the vertigo of irreducible ambiguity in the Horror genre. https://www.buzzsprout.com/2509184  My sister Andrea who works professionally as a scientist joins us for this episode's exploration of the slipperiness of the material reduction to "scientific facts."  https://www.buzzsprout.com/2565712 This is the link to my podcast "Deep Calls to Deep: Reading Together," which explores the possibilities for hermeneutic circles more thoroughly. https://youtu.be/nqaZp3-AK4Q and this is the YouTube link to the episode if you'd like a visual of us hashing out Annihilation. We get deep into the weird genetic refractions of Alex Garland's very loose take on Jeff Vandermeer's Annihilation. Area X seems to be a place of infinite possibilities, except for the possibility of remaining untouched by the mysterious, churning flows of organic codes that produce mixed bodies of unknowable intention. What is the intention of this alien presence in what seems to be a swamp somewhere on the Florida coast of the Gulf of Mexico? Maybe, it doesn't have one. Join us as we think about the human proclivity for self-destruction, the ambiguity of identity, and how the intentions of organic bodies arise from the non-intention of inorganic processes. https://www.martinessig.com [https://www.martinessig.com] Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co [http://jamesreeves.co] for the intro and outro music of most episodes, I mix the mixtapes that I post here.

Hermeneutic Circles: Jesus is Tested

I post this crossover episode as an example of the possibilities for hermeneutic circles as a religious practice. And as a reminder that our only freedom is the open and even playful interpretation of being. And I always love pointing out to people that if they want to follow Jesus, they would do well to adopt the curiosity about the meaning of being that led him out into the wilderness to have a conversation with Satan, and which led him to reinterpret scriptures according to his hermeneutic of love. It is often pointed out that Jesus would have be considered a poor interpreter of the bible in the light of modern Biblical scholarship, and that much to the chagrin of modern "Biblical Literalists," neither he nor any of his interlocutors held to such a limiting and deluded principle, except for maybe Satan, but that his open relation to his tradition allowed for him to understand himself and religious community in a new way. True followers of Christ seek to "make all things new." https://youtu.be/Fgjqb6bKJ_s My Uncle Father Herb, my Dad Bob, and I discuss Jesus's testing in the desert. I chose the passage this time. It has always spoken to me about how we are left to interpret the Word of God for ourselves but as a community of interpreters. There will be no one "absolute" interpretation that excludes all the others. However, there will be interpretations that cannot withstand the practices of a hermeneutic circle of responsible interpreters. A hermeneutic circle tests possible interpretations against a set of criteria, which for our circle of Biblical interpreters includes: historical-critical techniques and scholarly information, the history of the theological interpretations of the Church, and our own experiences of trying to apply Biblical teachings and narratives to our lives. But the most important principle for the interpretive practices of those who seek the God of love is love, which is sometimes called the interpretive practice of "Christ the Key" in the Church's tradition of Biblical interpretation. Our faith is that the histories, mythologies and even the laws of the Bible must be interpreted, which means they are open, except for those interpretations that would close one off to hope or love. Unloving Biblical interpretation is without the inspiration of the Holy Spirit and is what proliferates most rampantly today. This is the consequence of both our fallenness and our freedom to interpret without love's lure.  Love is revealed anew throughout ours lives as it has historically been reveled through out the lives of those who have sought it, but it is always a lure to love and never compulsory because love according to its nature must be freely chosen. Even when things seem dark or evil, it is our faith that God is still speaking as the lure to love. Jesus's test in the desert reveals His ministry and is character to Himself and to those that would follow Him. Satan's job as God's "prosecuting attorney," is to test and reveal. In the desert Jesus reinterprets the figure of the "Messiah" from his Jewish tradition and scripture according to the law of love, so that it becomes a figure not of power but of weakness as love does not overpower or control. Jesus passes His test by refusing to test, which is to choose the revelation of love over whatever revelation is given by tests of strength. If you want to check this episode out on YouTube: https://youtu.be/Fgjqb6bKJ_s https://www.martinessig.com [https://www.martinessig.com] Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co [http://jamesreeves.co] for the intro and outro music of most episodes, I mix the mixtapes that I post here.