- '90s style downtempo techno flecked with acid.
- Most releases on Brighton label Chicago Bee feature the kind of greyscale acid that can completely erase time on the dance floor. The imprint ostensibly operates as vinyl-only, discouraging people from buying digital versions of its 12-inches by pricing them at a cheeky £303. The track streams on Bandcamp are there to whet your appetite, limited to just two minutes each. Clearly, Chicago Bee has a particular experience in mind when releasing music.
It's this allegiance to the club that makes the label's new compilation, Home Listening: Acid And House, such an unexpected delight. Label owner Mark Churcher, who records scorchingly trippy acid house as A-Eno-Acid, drew inspiration from the classic techno compilation Virtualsex, released on Buzz in 1993. Back then, the LP gave the Detroit techno blueprint a melodic twist, adding lush pads and earwormy leads. Nearly 30 years after its release, Virtualsex still feels both forward thinking and beautifully alien.
Home Listening is a worthy spiritual successor. Churcher asked producers—some Chicago Bee alumni, some not—to imagine pairing Virtualsex's luminous techno with acid's 303 squelch. The goal was to find the coziness buried within the genre's often harsh textures, so instead of techno's urgent tempo, Home Listening slows the pace until everything hovers around 120 BPM. While this pace is pretty standard for house music, it’s the spaciousness—the way each sound spreads into the stereo field like watercolor bleed—that makes Home Listening so mellow. You can still move, but it's more likely to be a head bob while reading than a full-body experience.
Despite the mechanical rhythms, each track feels suspended in mid-air, glowing from within. "SW1," the mesmerizing opener from Postelektrik, begins with a stargazing pad before a deep house drum pattern fades in. Over the course of its seven minutes, Postelektrik sweeps the resonance on the sequence, sending certain frequencies twinkling through a cavernous reverb. The chords that wrap around the squiggling synth lines in Derek Carr's "No Surrender" are radiant and inviting. On "Dreams of Andromeda," iNFO pairs a bright melody with an enormous square wave bassline, but everything retains its own space. Midway through, most elements drop out to introduce a glassy chord structure that carries the rest of the song to the stratosphere.
Some cuts, like Forgotten Corner's "Maen Land" and Iron Blu's "Valtra" opt for sustained, unresolved tension. They tease release that never comes. The former introduces drones and creeping melodies over a plodding beat, only to methodically strip them away, replacing them with noisy sound design elements. "Valtra" takes the opposite tack, building towards a drum breakdown that doesn't arrive. Both appear in the album's arrangement perfectly, offering a perk up if the previous tracks' calming warmth caused you to zone out.
For the most part, though, Home Listening stays in a very relaxed mode. Though the songs can sometimes blur into one another, that kind of feels like the point. It's primarily an album made to soundtrack the mundane joys of doing dishes or staring out of your window, but it's also a meticulously crafted, enveloping collection of electronic music. You can hyperfocus on each producer's attention to detail or let it wash over you like the pleasant mist of an oil diffuser. It's the kind of record that'll have you looking for any excuse to put it on and spend another languid hour on the couch.
Tracklist01. Postelektrik - SW1
02. Derek Carr - No Surrender
03. Type 303 - Stairway To Jupiter
04. Monofonix - Omega
05. Ivan Golic - Floated
06. Iron Blu - Valtra
07. Fear-E - Haven't You Heard
08. Forgotten Corner - Maen Land
09. iNFO - Dreams Of Andromeda
10. A-Eno-Acid - Greek Town Casino