Had been thinking about this for a while, how tech house has become such a dirty word these days and how far away it is from its origins as a sound that was forged by DJs like Eddie Richards, Mr C, Terry Francis etc playing a mixture of underground house and deeper techno grooves at parties such as Wiggle, Heart & Soul, Vapourspace, Whoop Whoop, Kerfuffle etc.
Then a mate sent me this RA video which is actually quite good…
For me it was a pretty broad church taking in garage dubs, electro, breaks, Detroit techno and deep house. Here’s a few favourites from those early days, let’s hear your choices…
Still love this sound. And once you sift through the Beatport crap there is still some good stuff coming out that’s all about the basslines and the pads.
Don’t know much about the scene in all honesty but i think Layo & Bushwacka were part of it & i’ve always loved this track of theirs.
Techy, Electro, Breaky
A tech house enthusiast buddy of mine was fuming that the RA documentary wasn’t a 2 hour forensic examination of Croydon scene. But I thought it did a decent broad brushstrokes job at explaining how the term’s meaning got twisted.
At the time, for me, the scene seemed a bit blokey and musically on one level, but my taste errs to the girly and cheesy. There were certainly some real gems. This got a thoughtful reissue on the super Vinyl Underground label.
The Ideal label and distribution company seemed keyed into the sound. Ewan Pearson here
absolute disaster for Ibiza. personally i thought some interesting (if not mind blowing) stuff emerged out of the minimal aesthetic villalobos, audion, stimming and for a while up until about 10 years ago there these were still these south american/latin sounding tracks which seemed to be indigenous to IBZ and wouldn’t work in a cold climate. but I think everyone on that scene got very lazy and then just gave up on music, melody, warmth altogether to the point it is all now unbearable and popular with just the worst people in society.
