EVERY GENRE PROJECT - August 13 - Garage House
Genre of the Day - Garage House
Album of the Day - The Purist by Byron Stingily (1998)
Fractured emotions sometimes require simple truths to piece the mess back together. I found myself examining the roots of the matter rather than getting lost in the weeds in pondering today’s genre amidst my current destitute state, and thinking about dance music and its cathartic effects. Dance was a small tactic in the scheme of survival for ancient humans—it was a communicator of social cohesion, and also attracted a partner, and the power of an alluring dancer certainly hasn’t changed. Even if you believe you’re the most inept dancer, the issue probably lies more in a lack of confidence than predisposition: the ability to synchronize with a rhythm is part of our set of physical abilities called entrainment, the neural-nerve connection that also governs our ability to speak. To move to music is a need as much as voicing our thoughts is, and the host of benefits is telling: it activates our whole bodies, helps envision body image, relieves anxiety, decreases confusion, and can increase ‘fun and impulsiveness.’
The beauty at the core of dance music is to marvel in the ways innovative musicians continue to dig new grooves and envision new floors to help facilitate one of the most important human activities. “Last Night a DJ Saved My Life,” then, is more a tenet than a song title. Today’s genre acts as the bridge between two of the most influential dance spheres in foundational ‘80s house and across-the-pond UK garage. The catharsis of disco may have been dramatically blown to smithereens in the popular sphere, but the communities who needed dance’s release and uplift the most continued its legacy in the protective shadows of clubs and with four-on-the-floor, electronic beats. As house went deeper, a subset of DJs centered in New York City’s Paradise Garage and the sets of DJ Larry Levan harkened more directly back to disco while weaving in gospel’s soaring nature in parallel to concurrent Jersey sound and dub-influenced sound design.
To create a truly distinctive sound from the drum machines that took over the ‘80s was like finding a needle in a haystack; garage house’s success to that end remains one of its hallmarks. Its drum patterns were crisp, amplifying high-hats and hand claps, too often overlooked, to syncopated glory. Dub’s spatial emphases reverberate throughout garage house’s atmosphere: minor-key melodies echo and enwrap. As the decade turned to the ‘90s, the sound became more consolidated as it overflowed from the hallowed halls of the Paradise Garage, and R&B and gospel piano riffs and strings helped its disco-indebted sound endure. By the end of the decade, UK producers were the biggest purveyors of garage, though they’d transformed and sped up the sound with a dose of weirdness: its four-on-the-floor became more off-kilter and shuffled, its atmosphere darker and jazzier. As we already endured the English yesterday, we’re lucky to be sticking on Yank territory today.
Today’s artist Byron Stingily has lived quite the idiosyncratic life: he’s the father to an artist and an NFL player, a school principal, and is blessed with one of the highest tessituras (comfortable vocal range) I’ve heard on a man. He’s a powerhouse, or shall I say, a powergarage. His 1998 album The Purist spreads the wealth of garage house among several different iconic producers, a veritable compilation of the sound. “Back to Paradise” sky scraping tenor, the sparkling, jazzy keys, and tight drum propulsion does exactly what it sets out to do in transporting you to the iconic club. The atonal glimmers and deep dubby synths of “Beautiful Night” is like an irresistible, crafty house analog to the sound of space disco and points to the sound of the UK’s sprawling takes on the genre, though it’s hard to say if the Brits could make a garage song with as much uplift as many of these. “Run to Me” caught me at an unexpected vulnerable moment among these dismal couple of days and strangely made me tear up for a second. I’ve always loved UK garage, and I’m grateful to now have been exposed to its forebear. In considering our love for our favorite dance songs, we may implicitly feel the necessity of dancing in our lives, but explicitly appreciating its power if you’re not a career dancer is rarer. So, whether it’s garage house or any of the thousands of sounds the musical maestros of movement have curated, I recommend that you throw on a tune and take stock of dance’s eternal power by giving into one of our most ingrained capabilities.