Calcou - 24 (Live from Leipzig)

If you’ve written deep house off as background music for hotel lobbies, Calcou would like a word. “24,” recorded live in Leipzig, is the sound of the genre with a proper pulse and a full room in front of it. You can genuinely hear the space on this recording — the low end has that slightly loose, physical quality that studio versions tend to sand right off, and there’s a faint wash of crowd sitting underneath the whole thing that tells you this actually happened, that people were present and moving while it did. The groove is deep and patient, a warm rolling bassline with a single vocal sample looped just enough to hypnotise without ever wearing out its welcome. Live electronic recordings usually lose something crucial in the trip to headphones, and this one somehow gains instead; the imperfections turn out to be the point rather than a flaw. Around the four-minute mark it cracks open into this euphoric pad section that must have been genuinely unreal to stand inside. I have never once been to Leipzig. After more listens than I’d like to admit, I feel like I’ve at least spent an evening in this particular basement. Anjunadeep keep unearthing these live cuts, and I keep being grateful somebody bothers to record them properly.

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