Joe Claussell’s dancefloor spirituality
To recommend a podcast anytime after, say, 2015, is to prepare to be ignored, generally. We have too many podcasts. This is an incontrovertible fact. I’m going to recommend one anyway, because it deserves credit for enriching my life in countless ways via the dispensation of priceless cultural and musical knowledge. This podcast? Love is the Message: Music, Dance, and Counterculture, hosted by Tim Lawrence and Jeremy Gilbert. Lawrence and Gilbert teach cultural and political theory at the University of East London; they are also party hosts, sound system owners, and DJs. Tim Lawrence has written several key books on the history of dance music and club culture, including Love Saves the Day: a History of American Dance Music Culture 1970-1979. Jeremy Gilbert is known for leftist political writing such as Hegemony Now: How Big Tech and Wall Street Won the World (And How We Win it Back). If you are at all interested in dance music or cultural theory, it is probably going to be your sort of thing.
I got offered a DJ gig on New Year’s Eve 2019 on the strength of my reputation as person that likes and has opinions about music. It paid just enough to cover the cheapest Pioneer DJ controller on the market and provide a few dollars of pocket money. It was just playing some tunes to set the vibe during a dinner (thank god it was not a dance party, because my naive ass would’ve been done with DJing after one miserable night), and the theme was disco, which I really knew nothing about. I wasn’t raised on it, and I was really only familiar with the hits (and “disco” Billboard Hot 100 hits, it turns out, are mostly the dregs of the genre) so I had to start digging a little bit. That started an obsessive sort of love affair with dance music that has continued and expanded over the last several years and cost me untold dollars in 12” singles. Love is the Message and Love Saves the Day have been incredible resources for understanding the social conditions that spawned early club and DJ culture as well as discovering the music that was beloved by dancers at venues like The Loft and the Paradise Garage in the seventies and beyond.
This is really all just context for what I want to share this week, which is something I picked up from an offhand comment on a back-episode of Love is the Message I was listening to on a plane a couple of weeks ago. During a tangent about the mostly-unrealized potential of jazz-house, the hosts mentioned Joe Claussell as the exception—a producer that succeeded at fusing the two musical aesthetics together to make something that was more than just instrumental noodling over a four-on-the-floor house beat. I thought this sounded interesting, so made a little notes app note so I’d remember to listen when I was back on land. Unfortunately, like a lot of artists who primarily worked as remixers or producers, it’s hard to get a handle on the scope of Claussell’s work by just searching his name on the streaming service of your choice. I’ve been down this rabbit hole for a couple of weeks and I’m still just scratching the surface. One thing that is blessedly easy to find, however, is a multi-hour DJ set from the Mix the Vibe series. Its official title is Mix the Vibe: Joe Claussell; subtitled Over 140 Minutes of Spiritual Journey. This is a bold promise, but it turns out to be an apt description: you could absolutely have a spiritual experience to this.
Released in 1999, Claussell’s Mix the Vibe entry is, put simply, extremely my type of shit. It’s a selection of soulful, jazzy, percussive house tracks—some, like the monumental King Street Club Mix of Mondo Grosso’s “Souffles H” carrying Claussell’s own production or mixing credits, others courtesy of like-minded artists. New York and New Jersey legends like Blaze, Kerri Chandler, Louie Vega, Francois K., David Morales, and Timmy Regisford are represented, alongside a contingent of Japanese producers in Mondo Grosso, Soichi Terada, DJ Hiro, and T.P.O. The mixing leaves each track room to breathe while varying the energy enough to allow for deep house tracks like Basil’s “Getaway” to coexist happily with psychedelic explorations like MKL and Soy Sos’ “Moments in My Life (Abstract Jazz Remix).”
Joe Claussell is not an underground figure—he DJ’d, alongside Francois K. and Danny Krivit, at Body & Soul, which was one of New York’s most famous weekly parties during its run from 1996 to 2002. But I’m playing catch-up on fifty-something years of dance music, and there’s a lot I don’t know. Mix the Vibe is the perfect textbook, serving both as an introduction to Claussell’s spiritual, deep, groovy aesthetic and as historical documentation for a particularly rich period in the history of house music.
Mark your calendar:
I’ll be DJing at Duke’s here in Nashville on Sunday, March 3rd from 10pm-2am. Disco, funk, and more, plus all the beers and sandwiches as you could possibly desire. Come hang!
That's all for this now. If you liked this and want to forward it to a friend or two, that'd be pretty cool. See you next week!