Tranquility Bass’s Hippie-Hop
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Unlike those genre-hopping Johnny-come-latelies, Kandel has been immersed in both worlds for more than a decade. The 29-year-old Chicago native began dabbling in music at 12, learning to play guitar and keyboards. By 15 he’d loaded up on electronic gear and a four-track recorder and was madly concocting “experimental electronic tape manipulations” in his bedroom. After finishing at the Chicago Academy for the Arts, Kandel headed for Cal Arts, where he met kindred spirit Tom Chasteen. Together they began plotting ways to make the same sort of dance music they were consuming obsessively in record shops and nightclubs. In 1991, after several years of purchasing equipment, stockpiling potential samples, and writing songs, the duo released a couple 12-inch singles, one as Tranquility Bass, on its own Exist Dance label.
“It was a big thing for us to actually figure out how to mix down and make a record,” says Kandel. “We never really thought about how to sell them.” The label’s earliest re-leases paired down-tempo hip-hop beats with trancey ethnic-music samples–the sort of thing groups like Transglobal Underground and Loop Guru have been credited with since. (In fact, the British magazine Mixmag claims to have coined the term “trip-hop” to describe an early Tranquility Bass track.) Also in 1991 Kandel stopped by Chicago’s legendary Warehouse club on a visit home and realized that Exist Dance needed to embrace the unrelenting pulse of techno to make a dent in the dance-music scene. “Champion Sound,” a subsequent single credited to High Lonesome Sound System, one of several monikers he and Chasteen used, presciently paired a furious breakbeat scheme with raga samples–the sort of thing the Chemical Brothers now do with much less panache–and its underground success quickly established Exist Dance.
To celebrate the 50th anniversary of Chess Records’ inception, MCA, which owns the label’s vast catalog, has kicked off an extensive reissue program. Unfortunately, much of the music has already been repackaged in so many different configurations over the years that the new titles–9 of a projected 20 have hit the shelves in the last few weeks–add little to the big picture but confusion. Best-of offerings from Chuck Berry, Howlin’ Wolf, Etta James, Bo Diddley, Muddy Waters, and Buddy Guy, and even two decade-length overviews are filled with readily available nuggets. The only truly laudable release is the 51-track, two-CD set of the complete Chess recordings of Jimmy Rogers, the brilliant Muddy Waters guitarist whose own available work on Chess previously was limited to the 14-cut Chicago Bound–which MCA has recently made unavailable, probably in order to sell more reissues.
