midtown 120 blues

There must be a hundred records with voice-overs asking, "What is house?" The answer is always some greeting card bullshit about "life, love, happiness...." … House is not universal. House is hyper-specific … The contexts from which the deep house sound emerged are forgotten: sexual and gender crises, transgendered sex work, black market hormones, drug and alcohol addiction, loneliness, racism, HIV, ACT-UP, Tompkins Square Park, police brutality, queer-bashing, underpayment, unemployment and censorship—all at 120 beats per minute.

Terre Thaemlitz, Midtown 120 Intro, from her album Midtown 120 Blues

A clubber and DJ on New York's late 80s house scene, Terre Thaemlitz's relationship with deep house hails from a time before the genre's dominant narratives had formed. The quote above, from her album Midtown 120 Blues' opening track, Midtown 120 Intro, unpacks a musical space that sits awkwardly with our contemporary understanding of house music. This isn't a form synonymous with euphoria and celebration but with hurt and marginalisation. Oppressed LGBTQ+ and ethnic minority communities, that came together out of need as much as anything else. The utopian vision of house as one-humanity under ecstasy, which would gain so much traction on the other side of the Atlantic and still carries so much weight today, is explicitly rejected.

For Thaemlitz, deep house is about the experience of those who lived on the fringes. A radical take not only because it stands in stark contrast to popular conceptions of the genre, but because it shows how those conceptions are the opposite of what they purport to be, and are in fact profoundly exclusive. They reject the hard realities of difference by re-presenting the house dancefloor as a place where difference has no meaning, rather than as a space born from its injustices and joys.


By consciously referencing the deep house of the late 80s, Thaemlitz has crafted an album which channels the genre's past in an attempt to complicate and hopefully reframe its present. On the other hand, Midtown 120 Blues' quintessential deep house feel is necessarily burdened by the very conceptions of house Thaemlitz wants us to question. What this tension achieves is a kind of spectrality. The music draws us into Thaemlitz's world while simultaneously banishing it. It is both present and absent. The hallmark traits of the genre, which Thaemlitz's conjures so masterfully, reinforce this haunting effect: Echoes, resonant chords, spiralling percussion, airy pipes, blobs of bass, swirl together to create music that's both ethereal and melancholic.

This haunted quality reaches it's apotheosis on Grand Central, Pt. II (72 hrs. by Rail from Missouri). After eight minutes of ambience - warm synth washes, atomised piano notes, distant explosions, and a sample that describes a man in makeup being "knocked around" - the final minute dissolves into record crackle and then silence.

This silence - this absence - echoes the deeper absence at the heart of the record. As Thaemlitz tells us in the first line of his opening monologue, "House isn't so much as sound as a situation". It's no surprise then that a track whose title describes her journey from Missouri to New York and, by implication, the beginning of her encounter with the early house scene, should move from expressionism to extinction. Thaemlitz can create the sound, but she can't travel back to the situation. It died decades ago. Erased by time and a more enticing narrative. Perhaps in the stillness its ghost can be admitted.