For a genre often seen as futuristic and technology driven, house music is stubbornly traditional. Fans around the world can rattle off its genesis story, in which DJs Frankie Knuckles and Ron Hardy are prophets and the site of the Warehouse and the Music Box is holy ground. Producers still load up their tracks with commands to “jack your body,” just like Steve “Silk” Hurley did on his genre-defining 1986 single. Purists hold dear the precise models of synthesizers and drum machines—as well as some of the antiquated recording techniques—used on classic house tracks, continually resurrecting them to repave well-worn paths or create new ones. And people still rhapsodize about a “house nation” even though the movement is more of a diaspora now than ever before, with most of its centers in Europe. None of the innovations in house music since its birth have weakened this reverence for and deference to the past.
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Local producer Melvin Oliphant III, best known as Traxx, witnessed the salad days of Chicago house firsthand. A teenage fan during the scene’s first wave, in the mid-80s, he spent more than a decade establishing himself as a DJ before giving production a try. At the turn of the century he joined Jamal Moss (aka Hieroglyphic Being) and Daryl Cura (aka Deecoy) as the Dirty Criminals, releasing a single in 2001 and a full-length in 2004, then began collaborating on his own with an extensive list of artists, among them current collaborators Tadd Mullinix and D’Marc Cantu.
These lapses in fidelity are especially frustrating because Oliphant works by choice under many of the same technical limitations that faced the forefathers of house, out of admiration for the rigor required of producers who use analog gear. By opting not to conceal the evidence of his hands at work, he seems to be celebrating the flaws in his production—the way black-metal bands use fiendishly lo-fi sound to establish their kvlt bona fides. But Oliphant’s focus on the authenticity of his process doesn’t enrich his results. Many other American house artists, including Theo Parrish, Fred Peterkin (Black Jazz Consortium), and Omar-S, also favor vintage tools, but their music only occasionally feels as nakedly haphazard.
