10 Years of Strictly Rhythm–Mixed by “Little Louie” Vega
To be sure, Strictly Rhythm is not as aggressively experimental as Warp. And some might argue that there aren’t six discs worth of story to be told about a genre as formally unadventurous, if not regressive, as house often seems to be. But if 1999 proved anything, it’s that house–from Basement Jaxx to Armand Van Helden to Tuff Jam to DJ Funk to Faze Action–has become as variegated as any other music you’d care to name, in or outside dance culture. And Strictly Rhythm did (and does) play an important role in this development: the stuff Vega chose reflects house’s growth from raw postdisco to the current panoply of subcategories better than the output of any other label, from George Morel’s jazz-tinged instrumental “Let’s Groove” to Van Helden’s nastier, hip-hop-infused “Witch Doktor” to South Street Player’s “(Who) Keeps Changing Your Mind” (whose vocalist, Roland Clark, lent his supernal falsetto to Van Helden’s recent club hit “Flowerz”). Josh Wink’s jittery, acid-breakbeat throwdown “Higher State of Consciousness” was an enormous influence on future big-beat stars like Fatboy Slim and the Chemical Brothers, and Basement Jaxx started out trying to imitate the nervy soul of the Underground Solution’s “Luv Dancin’” or the Boss’s “Conga.”
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In more recent tracks like Michael Moog’s “That Sound” and New Visions’ “(Just) Me and You,” loops of obscure underground disco tracks (horn lines, string sweeps, rhythm guitar parts) are fed through low-pass filters to give them a blurry, in-and-out-of-focus feel. House fanatics have been hearing this stuff for years, starting with mid-90s records like Gusto’s “Disco’s Revenge” and Chicagoan DJ Sneak’s “You Can’t Hide From Your Bud,” and though it may seem like a cheap trick, it’s also a link to the music’s history, coating the past with a nostalgic aural haze. Oh yeah–and you can dance to it, which is twice as much as you can say for the electro-wankery on the Warp set’s Remixes disc.
