I know I said I'd be doing some jazz music, but I changed my mind, so now you guys get to enjoy some house! It's jazzy, I promise.
Alongside Marshall Jefferson, Larry Louis, and later successors like Moodymann and Theo Parrish, Larry/Fingers are one of the biggest, most important names in all of the scene.
Can you blame me for loving this album off the rip though? Do you see that cover art? What kind of wacked out badass name for an album is Ice Castles, anyway? (It's a marked improvement from the original album title Sceneries Not Songs Volume Tu (1995)). It means nothing, but that abstractness - taken far, far away by our imagination and the fantasies the music induces - can be everything.
And above all, there's a bravery and a trueness here, as in all of Heard's music, that can transcend and uplift anyone who gives it an earnest and open listen. Let yourself really dream with this one.
You might have heard of Larry Heard before if you're into house music at all - or perhaps you've heard him go by his famous pseudonym "Mr. Fingers". Known for his airy, atmospheric beats and foundational status within the deep house genre, he's been an icon of jazzy dance music that blurs the lines between genres in increasingly exciting ways.
Alongside Marshall Jefferson, Larry Louis, and later successors like Moodymann and Theo Parrish, Larry/Fingers are one of the biggest, most important names in all of the scene.
All it takes is one listen to his legendary track "Can You Feel It" to get an idea of what deep house sounds like and why Heard is so revered. It doesn't get more old school Chicago than this, folks; it's hypnotic, indulgent and soulful, minimalistic and a little discordant. Combining the best of jazz-funk, techno, and classic house, the burgeoning deep house of the late 80s was a whole different beast than anything you've heard before, or since. After laying down the blueprint for a whole genre to come, Heard went on to fuse all of his various influences (Kraftwerk, Mahavishnu Orchestra, George Duke, and more) into a career that continually defied easy categorization.
What makes Ice Castles any different than the rest of the house world out there? You'll notice pretty soon into it that it's much more downtempo and chill than you'd expect when you imagine house music, and it's different than a lot of Heard's discography because it's all instrumental. I'm of the opinion that these factors make it stand above a lot of his other works. Keeping things focused and streamlined helps focus on the grooves and the vibes, and there's plenty of both to go around here.
Can you blame me for loving this album off the rip though? Do you see that cover art? What kind of wacked out badass name for an album is Ice Castles, anyway? (It's a marked improvement from the original album title Sceneries Not Songs Volume Tu (1995)). It means nothing, but that abstractness - taken far, far away by our imagination and the fantasies the music induces - can be everything.
Starting right off with the evocative "Crystal Fantasy", Ice Castles moves quickly through a number of frigid moods and snappy beats. You can tell the percussion and synths are all artificial, but there's none of that uncanny perfection of drum machines from the 80s to make anything too cheesy here. Songs drift from the energetic and danceable ("Forbidden", which should be forbidden, for being so damn great) to the lush and contemplative ("Solitude").
Some tracks are exploratory and consistently interesting like the off-beat "Night Images" and the dreamscape that is "Nature's Bliss"; title track "Ice Castles" is uniquely mellow with a strong beat from start to finish and beautiful keyboards. Something about Heard's keys just encapsulates the innate melancholy of deep house so perfectly! From one end of the spectrum to another, everything works.
Songs like "Carla's Dance" and "Romantic Sway" are what makes this album special to me. Heard is just one of those artists that seems to follow a simple formula, but does what they do so well that it's hard to chalk the result up to anything but incredible skill. Sparse when they need to be and often filled with flourish, these tracks excel in the evocative quality of the beats, the emotion they drudge up from within the listener, and the effortless movements one is powerless to resist upon listening. Not much else like this out there, I promise.
The more I think about the use of that word "sparse", the more I think it stands out as a perfect descriptor of the beauty here. There's a sort of clandestine easiness that comes with this sound, as in, you could play it for most people out there and they'd find it engrossing for some reason or another. This universal appeal differs from the mediocrity of a lot of pop/commercial music, as that sort of thing is specifically engineered to be catchy, memorable, and inoffensive; the grooves here are so widely pleasurable because they're just straight up sublime. There's a lacking of rough edges because the goal is to appeal to the heart, not to prevent losing an audience; there's a lack of tangible structure and, subsequently, critique - as even to Mr. Fingers himself, music is less a concrete process or definition and more an abstract exploration of emotion and rhythm.
"I don't subscribe to [the idea that] music is supposed to be this, and supposed to be that, and produced like that and all... it's just expression."
-- Larry Heard, 1992, "The Wire" issue 103
And above all, there's a bravery and a trueness here, as in all of Heard's music, that can transcend and uplift anyone who gives it an earnest and open listen. Let yourself really dream with this one.
DREAM...
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