Giving progressive house a good name: Spooky’s Gargantuan charm
Plus Lady Blacktronika, Ruthven and more
On December 1, 2023, I became the first man in Barcelona to think about progressive house for a good two decades. OK, that might be an exaggeration but progressive house - once a very successful musical genre, with its own DJs, labels, nights and compilations - has pretty much dropped out of history, not to much erased as forgotten.
The occasion for this personal progressive house revival was double: firstly I reviewed a new EP for Pitchfork by Lauren Flax, whose production really reminded me of the early 90s progressive house sound and - for all that I battled to think of something else, on the grounds that no one really remembers what 90s progressive house is these days - I just couldn’t get away from it. Secondly, on this very newsletter, I wrote about the Megadog club night and how it was home to early progressive club acts like Underworld (a slightly tenuous link maybe), The Drum Club and - especially - Spooky, who were kings of the progressive sound.
90s progressive house may have been forgotten but I don’t particularly mourn its passing. For a start, there’s the name: I hate any musical genre being called “intelligent” or “progressive” because it suggests that other types of music aren’t. If you have progressive house, does that mean that other types of house are necessarily regressive? No, of course not. But all the same, the name offends. Then there’s progressive house’s lack of proper identity. Most musical genres and subgenres you can at least have a stab at identifying in a brief sentence. Progressive house is harder. And yet, when you heard it, back in its early 90s heyday, you knew what it was. So let’s give it a try.
Progressive house emerged in the UK’s club scene at the start of the 90s - Leftfield’s Not Forgotten, which came out in 1990, is often called the first progressive house track. It was, in a way, a reaction to a rave scene that was becoming harder, darker and faster, with breakbeats also coming to the fore. Progressive house - and, again, that damn name - went the other way: it was bright, tuneful and uplifting. It was a very clean type of music, with little in the way of distortion, fit for the new wave of posher clubs that were springing up in the UK as rave started to shut down.
It was, in many ways, a very British sound, arguably the first British take on house music (with apologies to bleep, which had more to do with techno), a very polite re-rub of the wild excesses of Chicago house, while its bass lines had more in common with dub, melodically, than with the disco that ruled American house music. Leading progressive house label Guerilla, for example, preferred the term “dub house” to progressive. Then again, in the early 90s, the British compared everything to dub. I remember a Melody Maker review earnestly comparing The Auteurs’ Lenny Valentino to dub. So go figure….
When written down like that, reduced to its obvious characteristics, prog house sounds utterly horrible: a tidy, neutered form of house that rejected rave’s wonderfully sordid innovation. And, certainly, you wouldn’t want to listen to too much progressive house in one sitting. But 90s progressive house arguably helped to lay the foundations for trance music and the genre itself definitely had its moments, most of which can be heard on Gargantuan, the debut album from Manchester duo Spooky (aka Duncan Forbes and Charlie May), a fabulous record of melodic electronic music that should appeal to fans of Orbital, Speedy J and Warp’s Artificial Intelligence series.
Over 10 songs Gargantuan demonstrates everything that was so fresh and intensely listenable about 90s progressive house at its best. The key to this is the album’s riffs, melodies and hooks, which it has in wild abundance. This is some of the most downright catchy electronic music of this, or any age. Take Schmoo, which grazed the UK charts by spending a week at 72: the song rides an entirely satisfying six-note organ riff, just jazzy enough to keep the listener hooked in without demanding too much mental fortitude, to which the duo add a gorgeous stuttering vocal effect that flits and dives around the mix like a psychedelic will-o’-the-wisp. It could just about be a trance riff, were trance music uniquely constructed from silk and 500 Thread Count Egyptian Cotton.
Spooky were also very skilled at cutting up vocals to create ultra-sticky hooks. The “you made a believer out of me” clip on Gargantuan’s Land Of Oz, sampled from Can’s epic Yoo Doo Right, is a brilliant recontextualisation that refuses to leave the cranium, landing just the right side of infuriating, while album opener Don’t Panic converts a throwaway vocal aside from Pixies’ Broken Face into a fabulously unlikely house music hook.
The fact that album closer Let’s Go also samples the Pixies, in this case the ghost-like howl of Frank Black’s background vocal to Where Is My Mind?, suggests a group with a real knack for finding unlikely sample sources - and making them work. It also probably helps to explain why Spooky were big with rock audiences. (They remixed both Chapterhouse and Lush, in what was a sublime, if short-lived, moment of electronic / shoegaze crossover.)
Progressive house’s other big crossover with trance - as trance was at the time, anyway - comes in its song structures. While much early 90s techno was loop-based and verging on the repetitive, on Gargantuan Spooky continue to throw in ideas, with some new idea generally coming along every two bars or so, creating the feel of a musical journey - or, perhaps better put, a progress - that trance would later hang its hat on. (The drums on Gargantuan, quite honestly, are nothing special; but they serve to keep the album moving on.) You can hear this best on Little Bullet, Part 1, a work of perpetual motion, whose interlaced synth riffs, rushing keyboard base and travelling bass line gently push the listener forward.
The influence of dub, meanwhile, can be found throughout the album even if it is dub as reinterpreted by nice young Englishmen rather than a raw King Tubby, Jamaican style. The album’s bass lines are low and anchoring, in that steady dub manner, while Aqualung takes the dub approach a whole lot further, using cavernous echo effects to give a welcome sense of space, like house music played out in an old, rather decrepit, cathedral. Aqualung is not just one of Gargantuan’s best songs, it is also one of the few that you could still imagine a DJ playing today, its sound suggesting the scuba deep house adventures of Two Lone Swordsmen or even Motorbass at their most techno.
Gargantuan’s calling card is also, perhaps, its Achilles' heel. It is a very listenable record, its clean edges, soft sounds and melodic tropes making for the perfect home listening experience. Gargantuan is - and I hope you’ll excuse the word - nice, in the same way that Brian Eno’s early ambient works, Orbital’s Brown album, The Byrds’ greatest hits or Röyksopp’s Melody A.M. are nice. Gargantuan is charming, convivial and inviting, its edges smoothed to aural perfection, in a way that suggests deliberate craft, rather than cursory lack of attention.
Spooky’s debut album would, as mentioned above, have fit soundly into Warp’s Artificial Intelligence series of “electronic listening music”, being released in the same month as Black Dog Productions’ Bytes; but it also fit into DJ sets by the more commercial likes of Sasha (of whom more later) and John Digweed, as well as chiming with the Megadog crowd.
Arguably, Gargantuan’s easy charm and adaptability counted against it, as the album ended up falling between three crowds. (Hell, the duo’s own Bandcamp says it “under-performed commercially”.) The duo went on to release a string of EPs - 1995’s Stereo EP comes highly recommended - before returning with their second LP, Found Sound, in 1996. Despite featuring a stirring Elizabeth Fraser feature on Hypo-Allergenic, the album sold badly, its more IDM-ish, less house friendly, sound failing to find the audience it richly merited.
And that might have been it, were it not for the hand of Sasha, the Northern English Superstar DJ, who tapped up Charlie May to work on his Xpander and Scorchio EPs in 1999 and 2000, the two records’ epically commercial sound essentially answering the questions: what would have happened if Spooky had leaned into the big-room trance sound that was starting to dominate dance music at the end of the 90s? (Answer: they would have cleaned up.) And whatever happened to progressive house? (It became trance music.)
Spooky made their return in 2002 with Belong - a big Sasha track - and Andromeda, by which time their music had floated too close to commercial trance for my ears; and they continue to make music today. As for 90s progressive house, its story is more tricky. You still hear the term “progressive house” bandied about, with Deadmau5, for example, often labeled as progressive. But to my ears the term as used today has little in common with the early 90s progressive house genre, with its bright synths, vocal samples and dub bass lines. It is, instead, more of a simple descriptor: Deadmau5 is house that is judged to be “progressive” in the sense of “not entirely commercial”; but it’s not progressive house as we once knew it, which appears to have been swallowed whole by the trance scene it helped to engender.
That’s a shame. But we’ll always have Spooky and their Pixies-sampling, white-man dub-exploring, simply Gargantuan charm.
Some listening
Lady Blacktronika - Baby I Got It
Lady Blacktronika has been described as “the first lady of deep house” but Baby I Got It is far nastier, funkier and generally messed up than deep house’s traditionally smooth curves. The song combines a distorted and brilliantly cut-up vocal sample with a bass drum thump that sounds like a Cyberman invasion, easing things off slightly with some swirly chords, before the listener is plunged right back into darkened basement pain.
I have a real thing for acapella vocals. I can - and in fact do - listen to hours of the Beach Boys acapellas that come on CD six of the deepest box sets; Jai Paul associate Ruthven taps right into this with The Window, which opens with a minute of the most beautiful soul singing I have heard all year and at least one genius chord change. Initially, I was kind of sad when the music came in, although its glam boogie stomp is, on reflection, pretty fun.
We’re not broadcasting live on the Radio Primavera Sound Twitch this week. And that means you can catch up with last Thursday’s edition, where I interviewed Kazu Makino from Blonde Redhead, in what was one of the most frank and interesting interviews I have ever done. She really doesn’t hold back on her band mates, festival shows and more. It’s in English too.
Yeah I know it’s December and the only playlist you care about is festive hits but indulge me - and my big old newest and the bestest playlist - for a moment. You’re going to need something when you’ve worn out your great aunt’s patience with endless Mariah Carey this festive season - so why not listen to my pick of new music?
Things I’ve done
RPS Presents at Primavera Weekender
The interviews team RPS did are now up on Soundcloud (and other platforms) for you to listen again. I particularly recommend Blonde Redhead (see above); Bob Mould (the nicest man in rock music, who has some fantastic tales to tell); The Dare (who basically fulfilled all of our teenage dreams by being New York’s hottest thing in music and is very happy to talk about it); Model / Actriz (a very unique band and stunning live); and Water From Your Eyes (whose Everyone’s Crushed album is one of my records of the year).
An interview
Nothing actually to report on this yet, but last night I interviewed a dance music hero for the first time and he proved utterly charming and fascinating. I won’t say who, as the piece isn’t out until January. But it made me very happy.
I’ve actually been going through a list of all the people I interviewed in 2023 - I do a lot of interviews: what with Radio Primavera Sound and various other things, I think I did almost 100 this year - and it is definitely the favourite part of my job. So thanks to everyone.
Recommended reading
Brief Majesty: Universal Harmonies & Frequencies Interviewed
I don’t do enough recommending of other people’s work in this newsletter and I apologise for that. There is loads of brilliant journalism out there and I really should mention more of it. Anyway, Jeremy Allen’s interview with Universal Harmonies & Frequencies (aka Jamal Moss and saxophonist Jerzy Mączyński) for The Quietus is fascinating, funny, infuriating AND reminds me what a brilliant record Tune IN is.