Another personal favorite here, Noggin takes it a bit deep and minimal after a decidedly idm intro.
First time I ever though, ‘dang samples are basically just like synths when treated correctly’ (an early misconception most electronic music producers might share), and first time I was like, damn, thats deep. I remember finishing this amidst a crappy summer school session at Blinn, and totally finding relief and escape and belonging in tracks like this.
Title: Au Cafe
Artist: Noggin
Album: Every Early Experiment
Date: 1997
This is one of my earliest attempts at deep house. Samples ripped from all sorts of various sources, most notably a French Canadian girl I found on irc to lend her vocals (where you at “Lady”?).
I always really liked this song, and it was kind of hard to pull off live, as half the keyboard was devoted to loops and the other half was me playing the string section live. All the jerks who I used to play live with who had serious superiority conflicts cause they used ‘real’ samplers hated this. Yea well guess what your ‘noise jams’ weren’t even that noisy and they were more like suck-fests…at least I could tell that they had no grasp over the equipment and were just making that crap to get a cool pass. Here comes my 15 year old ass like ‘hey guys check out this house track i made’ and all i get is ‘house!?! what a loser’. Small town life, what can you say?
Still a favorite. Forget the haters.
Download: Noggin – 10 Au Cafe (Vers1-early Experiment) (right click and choose ‘save as’)