“Deep House” is probably the most misused & misconstrued phrase in the dance music vernacular. It has been exhausted, distorted & erroneously applied to virtually every form of electronic music that has a 4-to-the-floor beat and a few key synthpads, a term that implies a sophistication, esoterism & general “deepness” that lends itself to the wholesale rape and pillage of just about every dance music apologist & skilled musical revisionist seeking to legitimize their specimens with a quick-fire labeling and associative justification. Practically every commercial knock-off of established underground trends gets spruced up with wild proclamations of deepness, attempts to paint over the glossy polish of wealth & hallow insincerity with a legitimate claim to the “underground.” But beyond all the assertions of a “deep house revival,” there was a time when the term referred to an real community disseminated across much of the Western world, a vibrant musical trend sprung from the flourishing possibilities of the 1990’s house music scene—one whose effect is still being felt to this day.
Concentrating on the instrumental abstraction of early electronic tracks, Prescription Records literally shook the very foundation of house music and opened an entirely new path to a new generation of producers who had never lived through the heyday of the Garage, Muzic Box or Zanzibar, a group of dance music enthusiasts who were determined to forge an entirely new aesthetic out of the ashes of disco and garage. Arguably more than any other label, Chicago’s Guidance Recordings symbolized this new obsession with conceptual instrumental expression, championing a slew of early forays into the domain cryptically ordained “deep house.” With releases from stalwarts suck as Larry Heard, Dana Kelly a.k.a. Callisto, Abacus and many, many more, the D.I.Y. styled, free-formed label focused on an anti-dogmatic approach to the art of A&R’ing, releasing a slew of new and unestablished talent as well as immortal legends, all in search of an identifiably new underground aesthetic centered around this new expressionism. Whether inspired by the classic deep instrumental styling of early NY and Chicago house or the otherworldly explorations of Detroit’s avant-garde, Guidance Recordings—especially during its critical early years—stood at the fore of the legitimately deep, melodically driven tracks of the latter 1990’s.
Eventually falling prey to the vapid promises of mass success and lounge-rooted mediocrity, Guidance Recordings fell by the waste side in the early 2000’s, leaving behind a plentiful and often-times contradictory catalog spanning close to a decade. Lately the great historical revisionists of electronic music tend to either entirely ignore its impact as a label, or conversely praise it categorically without in-depth knowledge of its legacy. Veteran deep house fanatics and dance music devotees Francis Englehardt & Paul Nickerson, a.k.a. slow to speak, have set out to justly chronicle this fabled label, determined to unravel the myth and translate the catalog into a tangible musical dissertation of quality deep house music—setting the record straight once and for all on this widely misunderstood and misrepresented label. Many of these tracks have been lost in the ceaselessly morphing trends of electronic fad and fancy, lost in the chasms of sealed-up closets, dusty storage spaces and damp basements. Resurrected, put to the test of time and delivered with the sincere underground enthusiasm of slow to speak’s sagely mastery in the art of dance music programming, let the distortions, confusions and misrepresentations cease once and for all with the concrete chronicling of this vital label: the definitive Guidance Mix.
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