Urban Groove Preview
GENE FARRIS
Wednesday, January 22
Skybar
Chicago ranks high on the list of big cosmopolitan cities, and it is also renowned for giving birth to two of the last century’s most innovative musical movements – blues and house.
While blues is still a force to be reckoned with in the Windy City, Chicago has, in the last 20 years, grown into a house music mecca, with producers like Sneak and Green Velvet pushing the scene’s powerful turbines.
Another of that toddlin’ town’s native sons, Gene Farris, made his mark on the second generation of house producers by injecting disco-charged samples into solid 4/4 riffs.
Farris created tracks with a distinct smoothness that had yet to be capitalized on by his musical contemporaries. At the same time that his tracks were aimed straight for the dancefloor, they were also distinctly listenable.
Farris’s next and most recent step has been to broaden the organics of his music, resisting straight sampling and instead developing and adding live instruments into his tracks to generate the same soulful feeling he’s always been known for.
"House music, electronic music – it’s a soulful thing," he says. "It’s always been that way. I don’t think that by adding instruments I’m doing anything new to this music. I’m just trying to develop my sound and expand. But organics, they’ve always been there – it’s just whether people pay attention."
That attention is part of what sets Farris in motion when discussing the present state of the dance nation. He attributes much of the perceived musical stasis to bandwagon-jumping media in North America that just can’t get their heads around electronic music.
"The thing is, we’re not just bangin’ on drum machines – (house producers have) studios the same as anyone else, and we develop songs, we play instruments. But in North America, the gatekeepers just don’t give it an opportunity. They can’t get their effin’ heads around the fact that this music isn’t about guitars."
For Farris, this focus on guitars is what separates North Americans from Europeans.
"In Europe, they have an appreciation in their media for music that isn’t just rock ’n’ roll," he says. "The media there, they get the idea – a producer is just like a band, they make music – that’s why so many of the DJs are recognized like musicians. They get regular time on TV and on the radio and that’s something that has never happened in North America, even though we sell a lot of records and a lot of our shows are sold out, but they ignore it because they don’t understand it or it’s not something they know how to sell."
Despite this disparity, Farris is certain it will make the music and the community stronger.
"We’re not gonna go away," he says. "It’s just like hip-hop – they’ll pay attention when they need to, but we’ll all keep on, playing to those who know." |
