He's Right at 'Home' - 3/01/2007

House champion Dennis Ferrer refreshes the genre with his debut artist album

By Dennis Romero

Sometime around 1992, I made the mistake of declaring that house music was dead, to a friend who was a house fanatic. Techno, I insisted, was the future. He read me the finger-snapping riot act, but I stood firm. Boy, was I wrong. Not that techno hasn't had a healthy resurgence in places such as Berlin (the Kompakt label), Detroit (the Spectral Sound label), and even here in Los Angeles (Compression, Droid Behavior parties). But house, as the old saying goes, will never die. And just to prove it, every few years an artist renews the 25-year-old, post-disco genre with a fever so contagious, the music makes you sweat just thinking about it.

The honor this time goes to Union City, New Jersey-based Dennis Ferrer, whose debut artist album, The World As I See It, is puro house yet wholly relevant to electronic dance music's future. Ferrer turns the house world upside down by bringing tough, driving rhythms back at a time when the genre has gotten soft enough for "smooth jazz" radio. House has been lacking grittiness, which Ferrer has brought back with tracks such as "P 2 Da J," with its speaker-busting bass and horror-flick synths, and "Transitions," with its minimal-but-sizzling syncopated voodoo. The flavors hark back to the early days, when house was more about momentous, unrelenting kick drums and spaced-out synthesizer stabs than chin-stroking musicianship.

"The saying here is, 'No sleepy shit,'" says Ferrer, 37. "I grew up where beats were the main thing in a record. I'm not into listening to jazz at the dance club. When you're a dance music producer, there's one main word in your job description - dance. I don't claim to be anything other than a dance music producer. I'm not an artist."

That's debatable. "How Do I Let Go" highlights elegant piano keys. (And Ferrer is mostly a one-man band on the album, save for some of the vocals.) "Church Lady" is user-friendly, to be sure - foot-tapping, at the least, is wholly unavoidable - but it's also transformative, righteous and supreme, taking listeners back to the cradle of African-American music (houses of worship) while urging them to move their hearts beyond the dance floor. Sunday-morning organs meet a chorus of hand-raising praise. The lead vocalist sings, "Church lady, can you save her a prayer/She ain't been seen since last night/And she's got us running scared." Perhaps the most noteworthy song on the The World As I See It is "Underground Is My Home," which has become a thumping club anthem after it was dedicated to Marques Wyatt's weekly Deep house night at Vanguard in Hollywood. The lyrics: "Where the planetary alignment is right/And the DJ cuts out the lights/Deep is where I'm home."

"It was Marques-influenced," Ferrer confirms. "My whole thing was that nobody really said that on a record - this is where I'm from, this is where I live. I decided to say it."

Ferrer grew up on the hardscrabble streets of the Boogie-Down Bronx, which explains how his particular brand of house got a dose of cojones, even as he now resides in northern New Jersey, the original home of melodic, soulful house. "If you're in a rough neighborhood," he says, "you're going to make rough stuff. That gave me a bit of an edge."

His early-'90s productions actually leaned toward techno and were put out on New York's Synewave label, but soon he met up with Kerri Chandler, an originator of "New Jersey deep." Ferrer became Chandler's ever-present production partner. ("I practically moved into his house, and we were making records in his living room," he notes.) By the beginning of the millennium, Ferrer had also developed a reputation as a go-to remixer, known for his juxtaposition of big drums and subtle-but-bubbly melodies. In 2003 he broke out with his own track, "Sandcastles," which occupied the record boxes of both house DJs and big-room "progressive" spinners.

Which brings us back to The World As I See It, a house album that breaks down the scene's walls of convention while maintaining a timeless presence.

"Dennis has given the house scene the shot in the arm it needed," says Wyatt, Deep's DJ and founder. "He has a rare gift to produce tracks and color outside the lines.