The Making of an Anti-Scenester
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
It caused a minor stir on the British and German underground scenes, but Hodge didn’t capitalize on it like he could’ve: since then he’s released several more singles for the label, produced a handful of remixes for artists like DJ Vadim and Spacetime Continuum, and released two albums under the name Conjoint, a collaboration with German producer David Moufang, jazz vibraphonist Karl Berger, and guitarist Gunther Ruit Kraus. In part he was busy with school–he has a film degree from Vassar–but he had also grown disillusioned. As techno flowed into the mainstream, he felt that the attendant culture subsumed the music. “I’m not very good at dealing with the noise of a scene,” he says. “When things pick up I tend to walk away. I’m really attracted to…I guess the annoying term would be noncontextualized spaces.”
He found what he was looking for in his collection of obscure soul and funk 45s from the late 60s and early 70s. Chicago, of course, is well-known for the rich legacy of its major soul labels and artists, but Hodge is more interested in the acts that slipped through the cracks than in the Curtis Mayfields and Jackie Wilsons. In the late 90s, he began to seek out the stories behind the singles, tracking down the musicians and producers.
Hodge stresses that Aestuarium is not a rare groove label–that is, his releases aren’t intended as fodder for sample-hungry DJs. “It’s not a coincidence that I’m only doing CDs now,” he says. His next release will most likely be an early-70s album by Boscoe, a heavily political Chicago funk band that featured drummer Steve Cobb.
