WOEBOT

In my recent deeply unpopular Funky House diatribe I noted that in the face of the shrinking market-place for Dance Music there has been a contraction in the genre-naming. Where once we might have a hundred fairly clearly delineated Micro-Genres now we simply have "House". A walk through London's few remaining record shops bears this out. The category of House has swollen in size, even occasionally swallowing whole other genres like Funky, Minimal and Electro House, while at once the overall terrain has contracted.

In many ways this could be gratifyingly viewed as a return to a normalcy, to be a manifestation of what "we" always knew. In the same way that Billy Joel remarked "Next phase, new wave, dance craze, anyways, It's still rock and roll to me", at the end of the day the multifarious strands of Acid, Hardcore, Garage, Gabba, Jungle, Illbient, Dubstep, Techno and (for a while) Grime were simply House music. This was the gist behind the Shanty House concept, though truthfully that entity owes almost nothing to House and everything to Hip-Hop.

I like canonical engineering and there isn't enough of it about these days. From the perspective of the consumer it's generic individuation that makes buying records fun. It's depressing to be confronted by a morass of blandly un-placeable music. I really admire exercises like Harold Bloom's "The Western Canon" and F.R. Leavis's "The Great Tradition". It's not just the critic's job to dissect, it's a crucial task to re-imagine and assemble. My recent idea has been, in the absence of any other strong generic competitor to it, to try and extract from within the tradition of House-music-proper a strand of what I'm calling "Mauve House". If the methodology used in tackling the pyramidic proliferation of dance music genres, used to be naming each subset, nowadays a more appropriate approach might be like filleting a joint of beef, that's to say stripping out one strand from the carcass.

Mauve House is, I believe, the truest manifestation of House music. In the same way that if you met God you'd be overwhelmed by his strangeness* what I'd describe as the true House music might appear marginal and curious. More heretically and illogically it's New York, not Chicago, that is the spiritual home of Mauve House. Birthed by Arthur Russell, and carried into the world by Underground Solution's "Luv Dancin" and Todd Terry's "Bango". It's the early output of Strictly Rhythm and Nu Groove records that most perfectly encapsulates the Mauve House aesthetic: minor-key, rhythmically improbable, with even Techno by Joey Beltram and Lenny Dee infused with the half-lit, gentle presence of Soul.

Isn't this what's implied by "Deep" House? I'd argue that Deep House is implicitly tied in with Chicago (even if it's not from Chi-town), with being "down with the programme". Deep House is equivalent to Detroit Techno purism. Even though, and now we move forward in time, one subsequent label's output, that of Clubhouse Records perfectly fits the bill of both, though what follows it wouldn't. In fact subsequent Mauve artists are round pegs distinguished by their inability to fit into square holes. The second wave came from all over the place: Miami's Murk, refugee from Detroit Marc Kinchin, and Holland's almost forgotten René et Gaston.

Todd Edwards must be the archetypical Mauve House artist. There's always been something deeply unconventional about Todd's melodies and harmonies to the degree that his mass appeal to the UK Garage Underground always baffled me. Todd acts as a conduit of Mauve House into the UK underground in the form of 2-Step. There seems to be a slight confusion about 2-Step at the moment which I'd like to clear up if I could. Joe Goddard of Hot Chip just did a "Twenty Best...2-Step records" for the always excellent FACT magazine. I'd link it but it's not online yet. It's a great break-out of very good records but almost none of them are 2-Step records, they're mostly early Grime MC tunes. Anything before So Solid or PAUG is 2-Step, anything after is Grime or Dubstep avant-le-lettre. Not to say that people didn't continue making stuff within the 2-step idiom, after all there's "Babycakes". Maybe this'd be better expressed with an equation: if either the Hip-Hop or Dancehall element or a combination of the two eclipses the House element then it's not 2-Step. Up until the year 2000 Locked On probably encapsulated the 2-Step sound. People have always scoffed about the idiocy and inappropriateness of UK Garage somehow claiming descent from the Paradise Garage, but I dunno, I hear it.

It's curious how often the "auteurs" of House music, in a sense those who dare to tread a path outside of the utilitarian dictat of the dancefloor have ended up making eccentric music which sounds Mauve. In the mid-nineties Mood II Swing made an improbable sonic pact with Berlin while Matthew Herbert strived to literally tear up the music's fabric while strangely (at his best) being recognisable within it. Around the same time two artists with a unique, skewered vision of House revived the fortunes of Detroit's Planet E, Moodymann and Recloose.

Very little of the Minimal House, obsessed as it is with stripping out "flavor", could qualify as Mauve house, however the intimate bedroom-disco quality of Isolée's music instantly mark it as Mauve house. Today the spirit of Mauve House is embodied in the beats of Jackson and his partner in crime Pépé Bradock. It's a shame to have to play gatekeeper but (disappointingly) none of the Funky House I've heard recently cuts it, let alone makes it Mauve.

*That's something that's borne out the recent excatations of the early gospel. Innit.
**I don't mean the over-exposed belting of Otis and Aretha, but rather the troubled blue vision of Bobby Bland and Ann Peebles or even the liminal voice-as-texture stylings of a thousand Disco renta-divas.