House Music Box (Past Present No Future) - DJ Hell

People, listen to the signals: when the club life is reawakening, DJ Hell returns with the album House Music Box (Past, Present, No Future). In contrast to its predecessor album Zukunftsmusik (2017), with his new work Hell looks back to the glorious early days of House and Techno in Chicago, Detroit and New York City. Obvious references are the heroes that vibrated the dancefloor from the late 80s, i.e. luminaries like Ron Hardy, Frankie Knuckles and Lil’ Louis from the Chicago house scene, or the legendary radio shows of The Electrifying Mojo from Detroit. Not to be forgotten are, of course, the NYC House of Larry Levan or the Nu Groove records from the early 90s – all of them served as musical godfathers for Hell’s House Music Box.

No DJ Hell album, without cover versions. Or, should we better call his idiosyncratic electronic editions of established hits new originals – referring to a term that Laibach coined. This definitely holds true for ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised’: his update of Gil Scott Heron’s soul classic turned into a veritable 4-on-the-floor version. The slogan, which originally came from the Black Power movement, carved out a remarkable career, not only thanks to several new versions, but equally alienated as an advertising slogan for bar chains. The fact that Hell takes up this track in the days of YouTube, Instagram and Facebook illustrates us today that the idea of a political revolution is long gone. For that reason, all he keeps from the wordy original is its headline while the impulsive beats prove all more, that at least the revolution of the dancefloor is nowhere near over.

Past, Present, No Future – even if Hell’s deep bow to the trailblazers and pioneers of electronic club music was already completed when the corona pandemic broke out, the subtitle of House Music Box proved apt even so in the light of the circumstance that especially the club scene is seriously affected from the coercive measures of the crisis. It was therefore quite prophetic that on ‘Jimi Hendrix’ you can hear pieces of the last interview that the guitarist gave shortly before his controversial death. „I can’t build anything right now, you know, because of the things that are happing right now. I just have to lay back and think about it all.” House Music Box is, in many ways, the right record at the right time. Because as DJ Hell speaks about his album: ‘House Music for me has always been a spiritual experience, a higher, different form of communication, so to speak’. So, let’s listen carefully what he reports about his musical excursions in the Past, Present and Future of House. 

A1. Jimi Hendrix