Kevin Mega McFall hosts Artist Randall Dean and Scholar Chloe Forte LIVE in the WNUR studio

Introduction

0:00You're tuned in to the Vintage House Show, home to the original stories of the history of house music, as told by the legends, pioneers, and icons. Hosted by Kevin Mega McFall, Lori Branch, and Lauren Lowry.

0:16Good evening, sir. These guys are all big influences on me and certainly house music.

0:30This is live. You're getting married. You're getting married, guys.

0:41No, that does not sound like a lot of... Yeah, walk around with that collar popped up. Yeah. Hey, do this, this, you do it here.

Guest Introduction

0:49So let's go on that. I want to talk a little bit about each of your illustrious careers because you guys have done a lot of... You've done a lot. All three of you have done amazing, you know, have had amazing contributions to what we call house music. You know, this is the Vintage House Show. And so part of what that is about is celebration and preservation. This is Lauren Sprayning. But the celebration and preservation of Chicago house legends and Chicago house music. And I think... I just want to go on that one. I think that's okay.

1:21I've seen a lot of students who have played with us on a holiday youtube for the future. It's aenge of scornals and Chicago house music. And that's why I went to boycott and it's Greton, for a boy who's built on a date. Totally. And I think that's a good job. And we, I guarantee you my job. It's just a form ofFeel for waiting on that one episode. Like,ructure and challenge at the actors. It's cool. Yeah. Yeah. But, yeah, that's cool. It's cool. Like some people you can be livediam.

1:41It's beautiful, you know? You can't feelивается. That's cool. my shoulder there he is and next to randall and next to me my right and left depending on

Chloe Forte Introduction

2:11where you're seeing yes where you're seated i've got an amazing academic leader in this field of music uh her name is chloe forte and she may be familiar to many of you as she is one of our former interns now going on to do incredible work in the field of academia around music in general but ethnomusicology specifically and uh she'll tell you more

2:52about it but i am pleased and ecstatic of course to be on air once again for another episode of the vintage house show and in the background working the boards um you might have met him during the summer uh our uh current intern mateo asabala yeah did i get that that's right i nailed it it took me

House Music Movement

3:21several months but we are a part of what is this movement called house and i'm thrilled again to have both chloe and randall dean in studio with me and of course i got to set this up so this past weekend was the department of cultural and uh special events cultural affairs and special events for the city of chicago's annual chicago house music festival and it was a time had by all

Chicago House Music Festival

3:57and one of my guests had the honor of playing during that festival uh randall dean so he's going to recap his experience i'll share a little bit i was fortunate i was joined by mrs mega um on saturday down at pritzker music pavilion and we indeed enjoyed ourselves and um we are uh you know in a season if you will of house music and of course vintage house show is central

4:32and centrally positioned to ensure that you all don't miss a beat literally and figuratively

Randall Dean Experience

4:42around this thing called house but i'm gonna toss it to randall to tell us about his time slot what that experience was like how he got uh connected and plugged in to chicago house music festival 2025 what's up everybody um mic check am i good okay i'm a little closer yeah yeah just making sure i've been singing my whole life so if i don't hold back i'll blow yeah i i have a loud voice what's up thank you guys for having me appreciate it what's up you know i brief you know

5:15without going into too much detail i i've been gigging a lot outside of the country and i haven't

Chloe Forte's Background

5:19had too much local love so to speak but it's you know there's a million people out there that do just as good as a job so i'm not i'm not mad about it but when i got the email from d case and they just said hey do you want to play the chicago house music festival i'm not gonna lie i cried real tears more more than one time that day went from my steps sat down on the side there again all happy all happy tears and uh and um i don't know it was it was a great time the stage crew you know there

5:52was hiccups but the stage the stage crew was on top of it they made things happen to the drop of a hat my stage manager harper was great um you know just getting face time with random people from that came from all over that drove down and got there early for my time slot and came up to me afterwards and they're asking me questions and the stories i'm telling them they're literally looking at me like i look at terry hunter you know the way that i look at my upline and it's just it's um it's humbling it's humbling when that's that stuff's been happening more more

6:22lately now and it's i don't even know how to process it into words that don't make me sound like i'm trying to use crayons this house music community is real because of all of that authentic emotion and sentiment um you know house is a feeling you know that is a bit of a cliche for some but it's real for for many others uh chloe talk to us about what brought you back to

6:56what's good um i came back obviously for the season of house music summer um i was at chosen few i like i've stayed in touch with everyone i texted lauren just to see and i think i did it through facebook messenger so it didn't really come through um i am in grad school in indiana i've been there for two years um but i go back and forth to chicago and to indiana to dance here uh to be in school

7:28sequestered in a library at bloomington uh but yeah the hoosiers in indiana uh yeah i i messaged lauren because i was going to be at chosen few i was gonna just say hey um and then we connected for

House Music Culture

7:45lunch and just started chatting again about school about the show um and i got linked back in it's so weird being back in the radio station uh so you were never out you know when you're a vintage house sir you're um in for life for life as they say yes born into it yeah so you're what brought you um specifically um specifically you're here and school's already started so what's up ah straight up uh i finished the master's degree i'm in ethnic musicology focusing on black music uh definitely the

8:22radio show uh interning with uh the vintage house show podcast and the dance music foundation archive got me interested in uh social dance music i was going out to the club in college and post college and it's how i made a lot of my friends in the city uh my family's from chicago so they all grew up and still uh go out to all of the house music picnics throughout the years with their family friends kids um so it's like a family cultural thing um but coming on the show i think i started seeing it as

9:00uh a living history um the idea that you guys are trying to get a full picture of a music genre whose cultural and uh monetary capital has only grown since it's begun um but whose uh story is often contested for various reasons uh so i know i started the importance you're being diplomatic is that um part of what they i suppose so yeah you take like the say the most neutral words um yeah so

9:36the idea of like gathering a lot of perspectives to understand how a music came together i got from here um yeah and then i worked at a music uh museum for a little bit and did a got to sneak in a disco exhibit uh with tim lawrence who did bluff saves the day on the new york uh loft scene mostly around david mancuso and um that was the stuff there yeah yeah it was really awesome and i realized i liked the

10:10research part more and like the music part more than um politics of working at a museum um and then i went to school so i've just been in school um yeah and it's my life going out and dancing for hours and uh i got two of my friends here too who are djs now and host parties and are um what's up crew what's good emma and nick what's up emma nick and emma are in the building shout them out what's up

10:48but yeah uh it's still like a lifestyle thing um yeah it's just what we do well well it's yeah you you as it's changed jump the shark in the interview because you went right into your sort of origin story and your why and your purpose and how you align to uh this movement which is cool i i love it i think it's some of her past time it with the show right coming back for her uh and so i'm gonna again toss it to randall

Randall Dean's Start

11:24because we're really curious randall how you got started in this genre in particular i think i heard you say and i did a little research and you've been musically inclined but then you took this thing to another level and for those of you tuned in if you haven't seen a randall dean set it is something to be seen and experienced and so um tell us how you got here randall uh you know i i said mid 90s

12:01i started going to rave parties i lived in rural part of illinois called woodstock like 75 miles northwest of chicago which back then it was sub 10 000 population so cornfields 45 minutes in every direction of cornfield and uh so we were hopping in my buddy's minivan that he bought specifically for this purpose no seats no seatbelts and driving two hours to harvey the highest murder rate in illinois at the time for a party where we had to park in an open basically parking lot get on a bus

12:31and go to another party or go and then that's where the party was and so that's the first exposure to house music i had but we were all taking so much acid at the time i think we were really more into the techno because we couldn't really listen to lyrics and you know it was like the whole time but then once i started sobering up around 17 i started getting in the house i found a craig alexander underground disco tape you know they had cassette tapes back there and i got a live at silly rabbit tape and i was like holy cow this all this because i was also in bands like my musical background is

13:03live music singer and uh so i started hearing like me you know i would go to band practice and make like you know at the time grunge music but then like all i listened to his house and it was like that my whole life whether i was in a funk band or whatever i get done with band practice and get in the car and put on house music so around 2001 we moved to chicago because our band was killing it in deKalb we won the battle of the bands at niu which we didn't have a drummer i'm telling against three other bands there was 300 people on the promenade in the comments screaming you guys flipping jam not flipping and it was

13:38one of the best feelings of our lives and so we moved out to chicago and then it was just a bunch of country mice in a big city and i was the only one that lasted lost the girl she was in the band the band was gone they're not lost as in lost souls right we broke up the band broke up okay com disco laid off 3 000 people that did what i did i lost my job and then two people flew airplanes into buildings all within like two months of me moving here and so i was like i was a fresh i was a fresh start i maxed the credit card out on on two decks and a man and a cheap mixer and my first crate of wax and

14:14actually i bought the wax first i heard i heard if you wanted the dj you had to buy records where did you buy from the midwest huh midwest audio midwest yeah i mean didn't that's where everybody bought their shit oh my gosh sorry um is this a college radio station can i say that i think it's a late night the dump button is out of my reach well you know you know you know the president said it on so am i allowed to say that word now right anyway i'll try not to but i i but i do have a pretty good amount uh anyway it's long story short i didn't have i i ran around chicago

14:48i actually have a song out now called mr dj hey mr dj it's not out it's it's done but it's waiting to come out it's it's me going and like trying to find a mentor when i moved here and like the the hook of the songs just like hey because i was out playing and a kid came up to me and asked and i mean like a kid kid and i so i use it as like a metaphor for how i must have seemed to them but that that sparked this whole idea that that juxtaposition of like this kid asking me and like me still nobody tells you when you're 17 that your 17 year old dream might be realized at 47 you know what i mean you know so it's weird that i when i'm i'm out there doing it i feel 17 but then

15:24like the next day i feel 47 so um no doubt you know it's it's it's been great i'm not gonna like only things anybody ever taught me on records was how to find the first kick yeah and after that it was i couldn't figure it out until i finally you you certainly had to figure out how to read the grooves right i literally that that little light tell you where the breakdowns are gonna be and like that i figured out on my own all this kid because he didn't know how to dj either he knew how to find the he's like you know to backspin it

15:56to the first kick jigga jigga jigga and then he's like that's how you do it and within a month i was doing really pretty well at it so what's interesting about that is a lot of people will spend time observing someone who had served as an inspiration for them so you're oh well yeah i mean we'll see the thing is like back in the day like they have a warehouse and they're stealing electricity from the phone line okay phone pole so they don't have enough juice or even any lights like they didn't have leds back then they they they were it's like everything was like it is red lasers and a strobe

16:31light you know if you were lucky you got the strobe light and so we didn't see the dj just like at the warehouse the original where i was like you know frankie's in a back room somewhere like so when we went out it was just all about like watching intentional watching watching each other and and stuff like that and i actually completely lost what was your question i don't want to get too far off the point yeah no i was really looking to see if there was an inspiration oh so yeah we couldn't watch them spin it was it wasn't until i when i moved out here and you started being i started being able to like look in the eyes of the djs that were playing as opposed to at the rave parties where it's

17:05like it's a cinder block and two by four dj booth in the far off you know what i mean and a smoke machine between you and now i can literally sit and watch paul johnson just i mean that dude could do magic he didn't even touch the highs mids and lows he just knew when to go whoop and then it was just like the best blend you've ever heard in your entire life and that's and i was doing way too much up there at the time so same with producing i used to way overproduce and then have to like the statue of david in the marble i i made the marble first and then i had and then i said to hack down my

17:35now i'm just trying to like make the statue you know what i mean like it was the same thing with tj so i want to come back to that other aspect of your musical inclination that you alluded to just

Music Production

17:48a moment ago but i want to ask chloe um so hearing about randall's story and certainly the time that you spent as an intern here and hearing the stories of a number of some of the pioneering uh figures of of house music what what's been your takeaway have you ever been inspired like you came in the building with like a half dozen 12 inch vinyl records what are you doing

18:21in this realm yourself uh i i think i actually got connected with the show through street feet because i was doing like the wednesday a lot of the girls i knew here were djs and i would go out and see them in the city and on like wednesday nights i think we would have someone would have a presentation on some kind of dance music uh somewhere in the world we would talk about it um and then you could uh shadow someone's show and learn how to dj here okay um so i did a lot of that

18:55uh i didn't realize i don't know why we didn't discover that no i because i was going like i don't know i was going in and out of it uh yeah uh a lot of the vinyl i got i i still don't spin vinyl nick and emma do um and probably could speak about uh finding mentors and and practicing through seeing um but i did a lot of cdj work i guess um yeah a lot of the vinyl i played just because i like

19:27to hear how the sound is i like uh i really like sound systems um and that was a big focus of the exhibit we did at the woody guthrie center was um the clip shorns that david had uh in his loft we got a couple donated and got to set it up um just like this idea of like the search for a type of sound and how different djs had different tastes for sound systems uh larry levon's building of paradise

19:58garage in a very specific way um i i gotta interrupt yeah i gotta pause you are a contributor to a major exhibit that you kind of just slid in there talk to us about what that exhibit was so you know set it up okay and then circle back with you know your contributions your intent and what you hoped people would take away from it all right so i'll tie it so i like i have i brought vinyl i liked learning

20:29about um 12 inch how it changed how um the depth of sound that could be uh recorded and held and then replayed uh i have an okay sound system at home um but uh i guess during college i got introduced to love saves the day by tim lawrence uh which rather than house is focusing on the late 60s into the 70s

20:59new york uh party scene i guess house party scene that became commodified disco um and its connection to house listen to her y'all because very often you know this evolution piece gets discombobulated by those who you know might have been there around some of the scene but no one is able to so eloquently sort of string it all together and make the through line so i want you all tuned in to listen carefully

21:34and then again she's an academic as well as you know someone passionate go ahead yeah but yeah so tim had done the book as his uh dissertation uh in early 2003 i think and he had been living in new york talking to a lot of these guys who were still alive some of them i a lot of them are not alive now and wrote this book on the development of this underground party scene that has laid the groundwork

22:05for uh maybe what we would call the uh night life dance music night life um but i was working at the woody guthrough center they wanted to do a disco exhibit but they were kind of leaning toward like saturday night fever uh like uh kind of glittery uh kind of thing uh and in line with the kind of ethos of a woody guthrough and music as political uh message uh i thought it'd be interesting to

22:37take the perspective that tim took of um a music that became a genre uh through the collaboration and efforts of people who really loved uh sound quality who loved dancing together um and i'm oversimplifying um well no i i appreciate that because you know some of us are lay people in in this space some are self-proclaimed historians um let's go

23:14you know you know and the the study is important there's some elements and themes that i hear you um expounding on that it's it's interesting because i always take it from a social movement lens right and and what i heard you describe is you know certainly the unity that that's uh fostered through collective dance to music but you also drill down on sound quality and yeah or the what we

23:53might all have at one point referred to as audiophiles right people who have a deep appreciation for the warmth yeah sound that emanates from from vinyl um and from various sound systems that lend themselves yeah to to vinyl talk about if you will you know let's juxtaposition that yeah against what digital has done to all that you describe and then i i also want to hear compression

24:27perspective so leave room for rando to jump in i'll probably ask you i i in my mind i think compression i use apple music because of the wave files i uh it seems like it's different like people i don't know that it can be compared it seems like it's more portable to have a usb there's in my understanding people who are who learned to spin vinyl think that people yeah who use usbs or laptops are like not

25:01uh doing it correctly but would you i mean it really depends yeah so there's perspectives here i mean as far what what is the exact question because like and performing with vinyl versus performing with usb there's no question i get off on vinyl but creating music digitally versus creating it analog in an analog studio there's virtually no way for a human to tell the difference if it's done properly and that's not me saying that with my opinion that's peer-reviewed scientific proven fact yeah it's not even a question

25:37it's not even an argument anymore were you all ready for this conversation i just you know i've been prepared not you all i'm talking about our audience i have a buddy of mine who has a a roads piano a real one he records with his his 88 key you know fully weighted he practices on the roads because the feeling for him playing it yes but to get that signal over there and then he hears that he hears a remake or a an emulator and he says he can't tell the difference and this is from the guy who he he has a

26:09phd in music you know he can and he has been producing since we were you know young and he says he can't tell the difference so i mean that that's just from the from his ear on that one piano as far as the different emulations of analog all this different stuff the fact of the matter is like psychoacoustics is becoming very interesting field with a lot of new research that's coming out that's verifying or debunking a lot of oral tradition so i've got to ask you to pause

26:41as well and step back to most people do have to ask me to pause

26:47oh snap i'm gonna i'm trying to break your laptop you set a laptop behind my clumsy butt psychoanalytics here we go i did that are we good i'm so sorry about that no harm no harm i think it's both very top heavy okay so psychoacoustics i think i said something about yeah oh break it down oh psychoanalytics are different than psychoacoustics so psychoacoustics the philosophy of psychoacoustics is getting is coming up in my world because there are new studies that um with uh that so how do you make some a little tiny

27:22speaker that fits in your ear sound like so for those of you that don't know we don't hear bass through our ears we hear bass through the vibrations of our bones in our body and so if you have a tiny little speaker that's supposed to recreate these big sounds how do you do that in a way that doesn't hurt someone's ears when they put them in because obviously that's that's a concern you know people's hearing is is thankfully finally getting some attention and so what psychoacoustic principles do what i how i use them and and it's a it's an entire field in in college but the way that i use them

27:57right now so they did studies where they took actual music that had actual frequencies what we are humans this is you ask i'm trying to boil this down in a small answer for you but this is what it is so so in other words like this humans can hear down to 20 hertz and that's and i'm and i'm we're only gonna be talking about sub so under 100 hertz is is is where you're is where you're like the low end of your bass in the high end of your kick and all the way down that's where that is and so in order to make those big sounds you need to have a big speaker in a big box that has room to generate these sounds

28:29and not only that then you have to be if you're inside you have to be in a place in the room where you're not have where you're not in a room motorist anyways but that's a whole other story so the way that i use the principle of cycloacoustics is based off the study that i read that i recently saw verified with actual production stuff like i just don't believe what you hear on youtube verify everything so i've been doing so much stuff that i read youtube that's a whole other thing they all just repeat themselves and youtube tells them to it's not their fault they're just stupid and they don't know it if they don't have a beard to the floor don't listen to them about music

29:03production all right that's that's my new rule and so what what this what cycloacoustics does in in a nutshell and i'll try to leave it at this you can you can trick the human ear into thinking it's hearing lower frequencies than it's really hearing by taking some low frequency saturating it running it through a filter and then cutting off the low ends but keeping those overtones created by the saturator in the sound and then this the resonant frequencies between those higher order harmonics

29:34will harmonize and interact with the rest of the music and your brain will fill in the blanks thinking it heard 20 hertz when all it really heard was third order harmonics above or fourth order harmonics depending on if you're using a tube or or you asked me a question that i would literally took it took me years to learn how to do this

29:56long story short is the people in the study couldn't tell the difference between the ones that actually had lower frequencies and the ones that did it and like they could and about the bone yeah they literally tricked their brains into thinking that they were here feeling bass the only thing that you didn't get was like your body actually vibrated so i've got a pair of the headphones that don't go in the ear they go over the the transductive yeah it's not the same thing but yeah and that those are interesting how do you like them i don't yeah i don't know anybody who does right they're uncomfortable

30:30to wear i have the over ear ones they're not no no no he means the ones that like sit in your temples or whatever yes right is that what you mean no mines are slightly different kind of similar but they sit over and it still sound i'm surprised that it sounds as clear as it does um and as punchy it allows you to do eq yeah oh that's neat yeah so i mean long story short is it's just it's just a way of like it's like it's like taking the it's a way of like taking the tip of the iceberg but tricking people into thinking they're still seeing the whole thing so so come come back up to our calendar here

31:03because now i want to bring this all back to house music right because i mean music is music but we are the vintage house show and in this genre besides the four on the floor base that you know really is a signature to our genre um it it has other elements you guys have done phenomenal work in um

31:36um enlightening myself and in our audience but one of the things that i'm forever curious about is um and this maybe goes to another level of psychographic analysis or psychoanalysis but there is a sentiment there's an emotion attached to this genre that is um again people attempt to describe it

House Music Emotion

32:05we've gotten this catch-all phrase house is a feeling but what from your perspectives is that other element and you've talked about the technical components of of music and particularly some attributes of of um you know bass and the lower frequencies which are uh key to the genre but talk about if you can and you have perspective and i'm going to start with you chloe on what you know

32:38soul music yeah the soul music you know in house music have some synonymous characteristics yeah i mean i'm gonna claim novice and amateur on this question but i will give you what i have been thinking about i'm taking everything from you guys that you have tonight love it uh so i i'm i'm often thinking about uh what elements of a regional genre make it identifiable as such uh with disco a lot of the philly

33:11sound and the uh brass instrumentation and the hi-hat patterns uh became synonymous with that sound um um yeah uh and one of the shows i guess i was an intern on with uh dj celeste she drew a lot of attention to uh chicago's history of like bopping music stepping music uh being the preeminent social dance music uh

33:45prior to disco and house um i mean in my mind because people do what they call house music all the time um and to me it doesn't always work or it yeah not all of not all attempts work uh chicago house seems to swing a little bit um i don't know i mean it's smoother uh i don't have as as many crisp words to describe

34:17sound quality um but i i think it's interesting that people do attempt to emulate a chicago house sound and not everyone comes close to it that uh yes often people you can hear sometimes the difference in the city of origin of a song um i don't think i can say what yeah it makes chicago house chicago house there's what i'm gonna claim being young there's a footprint well young but attuned to what it

34:56really has that's central to it i think i'm giving you credit for and as you yeah you know go move through your candidacy for this uh you know acknowledgement of all of the work that you're putting into researching and understanding and coming up with methodologies theories and practice you'll get there i'll say that like i've been going to i yeah or i go out with my cousins

35:28uh shout out to riri and aquila if you guys are listening i've been going out with them all summer to different uh house events um i mean i listen to a lot of detroit techno too i i house music tends to be slower bpm uh or maybe the stuff that i was listening to with them this summer is a slower bpm uh at least the stuff that they listen to it's kind of smoother it's it is still a heavy uh thick kick drum and bass line i think the places we go people are oriented toward a

36:07grooving bass line and uh swinging the drums and that's what i'll say i'll leave it there that's very bait that's general um randall dean so your question is what what makes house that the genre besides music sound quality stuff like you want to know like what what's the element in this type of music that makes it house over just euro dance or in my hypothesis right is that there is some

36:38emotional sentimental yeah hook yeah that is element essential for something that makes it yeah it's it's definitely in this genre to me it seems clear it's definitely the culture around it so like when you when you chicago house music can't be recreated anywhere else because it's not here and you don't have you know you don't have simone green's guest starring on one of your records you don't have you know carla pratho or dodge or you know you know i mean and maybe those people from

37:12europe have big budgets and they can call them up but i guarantee you that record is still not going to sound like a chicago house record because it was made in sweden and carla's voice is great and dodge's voice is great and i hear mike dunn on i've heard mike mike one of my favorites collaborate with another one of my uk favorites and that track isn't one of my favorites of theirs even though it's the two of them together you think that i would be like having like a musical like you know explosion in my head like and i still play that track but they're they have individual tracks that i but i like more but it's because it's just it's a culture it's it's a lifestyle it's a vibe like like philly house

37:46isn't going to sound the same as chicago house but it's still house it's all house to me and if i was born 10 years earlier it would have been all disco to me i don't like this the over sub genreizing and i get it because i'm into seo and all that stuff and i understand algorithms as much as the next guy but the thing is if you like if you don't say deep house but now the problem is you've got people like um like a very very same space like beatport and track source what i love about beatport is they're like deep house click here for examples of what we mean by that instead

38:18of having you know but because if you listen to deep house on track source it it sounds like chicago tracks it sounds like chicago what what us what derrick carter would describe as deep house and if you if you listen to deep house on beatport it would be what we would consider progressive house or trance almost sometimes very trancy elements but in europe if someone says oh i like that deep house sound they're talking like borderline minimal techno but just a little bit groovier and honestly some of it sounds like really good freaking house music the way that they do it

38:49over there uh and i mean i have one that it was it was classified as like minimal techno and i play it with all my house sets it does not sound like minimal it sounds like a funky house track and i just don't understand the genreizing and that's what so i left the record companies sorted out you know the record labels sorted out but and now i'm doing stuff on projects but but for me it's like you know i i i send terry stuff all the time uh and he and he he gives me feedback on it but it wasn't until he started like he said he gave me an assignment he said write me a record that you think terry hunter

39:22would play and so i went home and i wrote him this record and he liked it he i mean he called me back so quickly on it i i i thought he was either gonna clown me or that i actually thought he was gonna clown me but but he liked it and so now i'm putting a whole project together instead of it just being like so for me like that's you're asking about house music and the sound and that's a lot of the sort of the same stuff i'm going through with myself trying to define how do i want to present myself as i i'm i'm i'm writing so much different stuff i've actually already started this like a an alias that's that's with nothing no social media is already doing stupidly well compared to my

39:57other one it's called petty davis yeah you can it's on spotify there's a there's a few tracks on spotify but his their first year i don't know what they are yet i might i might ask my wife to be that person i don't know i'm just making music under that moniker right now just that that doesn't fit under the chicago deep house music that like sound that i'm going for with randall dean like i'm a singer songwriter i want to do songs and now that i've finally learned how to make a record sound

40:29good sonically i'm going back to my roots of being a songwriter again and trying to write a good song yeah i was gonna ask that question what do you how do you you know position yourself and look i'm a believer before you answer that um that god created us not to be singular in our purpose and and how we live and what we do um but certainly society has gifted us this curse of labels and categorization um because it helps it's a sociological thing right it helps us define

41:04things and be able to communicate about it to people in a way that they'll understand so it didn't matter before when you didn't have four trillion versions of the same information available to you when your grandmother was telling you about something if this is house music that was house music whatever grandma said house music was you know what i mean and so now house music is whoever wants to like 100 000 new songs on spotify every day that's not just house music but i mean like it's it's flooded right yeah we got you know it's almost a proportionate number of categories

41:35but but in terms of who you are and what you do and what our audience should recognize when they want to learn more enjoy a randald dean creation yeah what what what is that well except for a couple of records that that sounds like sounds like a female vocal because it is a female vocal i do all the vocals on all my i write all the music i produce all the tracks all of the instruments except unless the person if there's another name in the in the the byline then and then like that person played the saxophone that

42:09you hear but other than that i i do all the music on that but um even some of the stuff that sounds like a female vocalist is still me so so singer songwriter producer and dj yeah you know djing it's it's so fun for me i used to be a live singer so like that it's like it's nothing has come close to that yet so my my end game has always been to put together a catalog of music that could be reproduced live and still be house music that's why like coming up in chicago bands like mr ali and pevin

42:43everett seance divine and those cats and even even simone green and her band down at the m lounge with they have she has a three-piece band plus her that can make any house music song into any michael jackson song and and they won't stick it they're like the santana of house music and they play and like a 20-person bar that i wish that was like i wish it was the all-state arena it's like it's so good and and i've i've had a good fortune to work with her too on a track one of my earliest actually and immaculate uh my first actually these guys signed it this is really weird so flew out to

43:14amsterdam in 2018 as a last minute add-on to one of um ronda flowers events out there it was an official ad event i was on at like 4 p.m and uh turbo woke up late and it was a whole other but anyway got to the show if it wasn't for me opening at 4 p.m i would have never met these guys because they were there they were there for one hour before their stuff and just for the folks that are not able to see us met them at the bar i i closed my eyes played the first record and then 30 minutes

43:45later i opened my eyes the entire bar was full nobody was sitting and every time i put on an original song people got out of the stools and the staff stopped and started dancing and i was like in chicago i'm like here goes whenever i play an original there i own i started playing more originals and then after people from other countries are coming up to me and like getting my information it was nuts and it literally i got signed uh you know honestly i go where i'm booked i don't have i wish i had money to globetrot you know for fun i just i'm a musician so you know i'm i've got my

44:20i've got enough to cover my condo with my bills and that's about it but but you know anyway just just because of that forum slot so never never be down about opening you guys just play your heart out because these guys saw me they gave me a thumb drive i gave them one they signed two tracks and that's still one of the biggest labels i've been on to date awesome awesome i want to uh ask you chloe so when you randall was just talking about hey i'm a musician i i can cover my living expenses

44:51when you uh complete your candidacy for this doctorate degree what what's in store for you are you gonna be a professor are you going on the lecture circuit are you gonna uh we are watching the humanities be gutted uh i won't say that that you're not gonna get um uh the last like 30 years however i don't know that the uh academic institution as it's been historically is uh as

45:26uh consistent of a place to get work as it used to be um for various reasons i would love to be a professor i think it'd be fun um yeah i think i would be too i think i would enjoy it uh however my contingency plan that is actually part of interest is uh intellectual property with ai um working on like uh voice reproduction or the lack of laws around uh ai reproduction and uh musician ownership

45:57very beginning stages so hopefully somewhere in between humanities and the academy and um um the technical ethical side law side of ai um as it relates to music and uh ownership or music as intellectual property so you would consult with um law firms or creators or all of the above or digitally my interest is uh the lack of um regulation around biometric data which i'm taking to include

46:38uh vocal uh data that um companies are using yeah without much uh regulation um it's a wild frontier right now yeah it seems like it yeah yeah i have snoop dog calling up to sell me car insurance all the time yeah isn't that crazy i think it's wild no it's wild it's a dialogue i just i i literally get messages

47:08from what sounds roughly like snoop dog trying to sell me car insurance or like update my these are phone calls yeah oh no they're just they're robo calls that come to my google voice number nobody has nobody has my real thing you know but i just i they're like hey my nizzle and i'm like i'm like oh no i'm like i'm like here you go again and it's always a different number i'm like how many numbers do you have snoop geez and some people are like actually tricked by it like i've i know people who met you know the 50 cents ones on facebook are are yeah because there's a lot of there's a lot

47:41he does a lot of interviews yeah so there's a lot of yeah exactly yeah machine learning because you'll see it'll start off with like a two minute clip a two second clip where he is speaking but then it'll fade off to a montage of 50 cent whatever and then it's like some just stuff right out of like a machiavelli like script that they plugged into the ai script there's a voice reader thing this it's it's so weird you know um something that i think is really interesting that i you haven't brought up and this is nothing that you asked a question about but i just i i'm i'm riffing right now i think it's really interesting is that because of all this ai recreation and because everything's uploaded so much and

48:16because it's going to get to a point very quickly where someone can't tell if they're listening to a robot song or a real person song yeah it's going to like what what a lot of musicians are worried about oh their robots are going to replace us but what's really cool is if you get better at your craft in a very very near future that i see having the ability to do it live so someone can come watch it happen and watch your finger play that string and that chord and that key and whatever it's going to become so much more valuable like valuable as it was during mozart because that was the only option

48:49like because if people who are really music lovers aren't turned on all the way by a computer song and you'll be able to tell there's no there's no ai yet that's even going to come close to making a chicago hop song you can you can give them whatever prompt you want it's not going to sound anything like terry hunter it's not going to sound like anything like paul johnson it's not going to sound anything like any of our of our people same thing with any of the greats because they were sampling other people's stuff and their culture was built on top of the backs of another culture of their predecessors of their same culture like i'm a tourist and i'm very grateful to be adopted by the house

49:22music scene but like just there's no way a computer is going to recreate what generations of people have passed on to create it's like you know like epigenetics but musically you know what i mean like there's no way a computer has that because they don't have that much you know i i don't think so at least i've heard some people get prompts and there's no it sounds like wow that could be on the radio not a house music song no yeah not at all and you all have been amazing guests because the thread of the conversation has continued to build i mean this is where i wanted to go and getting your

49:56perspectives on you know the state of things right particularly uh the state of music and ai and with

Music and AI

50:07that uh confluence of you know technologies um is going to result in in terms of how people listen discern enjoy the genre you chloe have a a perspective on that history and so it sounded like you're going to be able to utilize that history to inform and help create and delineate right for those organizations

50:39that are looking to catch any misappropriation and use uh talk to me about what that enforcement could look like right is it is it a bunch of litigation and torts or is it uh what you know what and i'm in spy versus spy it's gonna be one and versus the other

51:06who's tuned in from uh her nyu law school like you said yeah i got mrs mega i got mini mega uh you know yeah yeah yeah i had i had my values wrong um i think i think what you said is true but my question always is the people who consume the music is the cheap knockoff often it's good enough for them a lot and they'll pay for it no no um and that's where the conversation usually ends for

51:40companies like if you're not an audiophile then you're you're just okay with the not necessarily not you're okay with it i think uh the companies i think where my answer to your question is is that there would have to be a cultural shift of how we value uh people culture uh music authenticity right now the value is that how little can we put into something to sell the most things how close can we

52:13get this to the vague shape of a regional sound uh and sell a lot of it that people will accept it um

52:25and with the lack of regulation that protects uh individual property owners whether that be the physical rights or yeah the rights to play your own music or to own your masters whether that's the right to your voice or the face your face likeness in a grocery store um it's a free-for-all that favors companies using it all and not paying us so uh the law would in my mind begins with challenging the

53:02i mean we'll see if it ever gets there challenging the cultural structure of western civilization uh and i'm laughing i'm quite serious oh i'm yeah we're i don't know if that'll change uh with you yeah um we're we're at the top of the hour you're tuned in to w and you are 89.3 fm and hd1 evans in chicago you're tuned into the vintage house show it's your main man mega i'm in studio

53:34with uh chloe forte and randall dean we have been like i don't want to infringe on the tedx brand but we've been having like a tedx talk up in here tonight um because i've got uh some incredible minds uh to my my right every direction from wherever you're looking can i ask another question though yeah i'm gonna impose it to y'all as well uh keep the conversation going and let's stay on this screen we got

54:08probably another five minutes as you make uh chicago house music what is what are you looking for how do you formulate your the elements of the music or your drums like okay so i i you know it's funny because like i go to other countries and they say i'll say a word and they'll say oh say that say that word one more time and i'm in another country and and it's a word like the you know and they're like oh that's chicago accent and i'm like what do you you know so so to say that i've ever intentionally tried to

54:41make a chicago house track that i've never done that i just have it's like that's just my accent musically i guess because that's who i grew up around hearing people talk like or make music like you know um and i and i have to admit that i do have a lot of different influences so it was it wasn't until terry finally called me and said make me a record that you think that i would play because i keep sending my stuff and he's like the sound quality is there he's like and he's like but he's like i've and he told me and you know he sat me down and like it's it's i i own the world for this and i've told him this to his face so and he's like i see what you nod your head to we've been

55:16going out as friends in music for years and he's like then you bring me stuff that sounds good he's like but i don't hear that i don't hear your soul in it and i'm like and it really set me it's like realigned my compass like a lot and so and i went home and i made the song shakedown and i sent it to him and like and i told you guys about it earlier and it was just like so if that's what if that's what a chicago house record sounds like coming out of me then that then i'm i'm i'm gonna start i'm making an ep of that stuff using and this time instead of it me recreating the sound design

55:46for the song from scratch which i do every single time it's time consuming af but i i'm still learning three years i put out records five years before it took me eight weeks to write one song now what i did then in eight weeks it takes me one session of four hours to do so so the last three years i've been putting in forty three hundred hours per year in the chair so maybe last year four thousand so i've had my ten thousand hours in the first two years you know almost and and as a result i got

56:18really good at making it sound good and i but but but but i also was like i can make it sound good i none of the music that i was making and i have to admit i don't i don't write for necessarily other people but if there's a venn diagram between what people want to hear and what i make what i want to make i'll shoot for that overlap and so when i started to do that again again and i and i and i'm i regret it i said it's trying it started veering a lot more towards what a lot of like the youth are consuming now in chicago but what really set me straight is when i got my spotify numbers this year

56:55and they're like four thousand percent higher than the two years ago and i started looking around the world where's my music and so it wasn't that i wasn't making real house music it's that chicago didn't like the house music i was making yeah and and so i started booking more shows in mexico and like doing where they listen to like for some reason spanish-speaking countries love my stuff and i don't speak spanish i have one spanish-speaking song coming out on fresco records uh it's actually out on bandcamp right now it's it's called pate a la calle my vocalist

57:27gold girl she's got panamanian roots and so she uses a lot of really cool panamanian sort of spanish slang and check it out it's it's out on bandcamp it's coming on spotify anyway under the randall dean under randall dean yeah and uh on fresco records uh which is uh run by dj jess out of chicago yeah he goes he's uh he's true blue anyway um so yeah i don't know it's it's great i i don't even know how we got off on the subject but as far as like it's like so i don't i don't ever try to make a chicago house record and i don't even know that i have a right to say that i ever have

57:58i just live in chicago i consume i've been consuming house music here since 93 regularly religiously well you you top the show by talking about that chicago the element is its culture so agree 100 and i think that reason like i almost feel like that's it's weird because i just noticed as you were telling me that and like recounting like what i had said so i i talk about like when i when i first started spinning records in chicago in 01 when i first started gigging there were a lot of medium-sized clubs

58:32they're like small to medium-sized clubs like i had a friday residency at this place called lava lounge on on damon and you walked in the and when you hear the term hole in the wall this is what they're talking about you walk in through the bar and there's a there's a long strip bar where you can barely get through but then you go through this literal hole in the brick wall and that's where the couches were and then another hole in another wall if you ever been to the top floor of exit before it closed down and that you know the bar off to the left out that's just like okay somebody with a sledgehammer made this room for us and i love it and that's what makes it chicago and that was

59:06part of the you heard that in the music and now everything is either mega club or some dude bringing his speakers to a bar that doesn't have a ppa and hoping for the best and there's no real in between like the middle class of house music or venues are is disappearing and uh i feel like i feel like you can almost hear that in the music that's coming out of or at least that's being supported by the listeners in chicago but it's weird it's one of those chicken and egg things it's like people think well the algorithms are telling us what to listen to and as a result musicians are making more of that

59:40music because that's what they think people want to listen to because of that what they are listening to so in other words an algorithm is literally telling musicians how to write their music now yeah and everything's data driven and so it's i don't know it's it's it is it's just like but then it gets to a point where it's like why do we need the human well but i want to go back to chloe's prediction and that we might get back to or one of you said this it is me i feel i feel like i'm sorry no you're you're you referred to like moving back towards where mozart was playing and we were consuming his

1:00:15performance right as much as we were the music look at it like this like like look at ai like uber at the beginning there was a ton of people doing it because it was like holy cow this is so easy i i have 10 minutes to work you know it's and it's a great business model for independent people to just like get a little bit of work in and if you're if you're got down time and or you can play your music or do whatever you want but then everybody did it and then there was competitors and and people were like oh it's the death of this and and then now there's going to be cars that drive themselves

1:00:47you know it's it's going to get to a point where where it the field will settle of course there's going to be a lot of people the bar of the barrier of entry for djing during the pandemic got lowered so far that every bored person could pick up like a very reasonably priced a controller and and do a pretty decent job and the thing is if you were only ever a decent dj to begin with then you should be worried and if the only music you ever made before ai was the background music at a grocery store or on a

1:01:17commercial you should be worried but if you're a true artist like reva star trapped in a tiny little room with 4 000 keyboards you know grinding like you know at jazz if you look at i mean they're in a lab they look like they're part of the experiment you know yeah those people are going to be the ones the the and the people that make that music and you know that you see terry hunter doing like a walkthrough studio walkthrough and he'll have an entire band playing his music live and he'll be like no plugins you know what i mean like that's going to be something that people will pay money to

1:01:47see well and before we you know i i appreciate what you just declare i'm curious because of all of this knowledge and uh understanding that you have chloe would you ever consider moving into the creator space and if so then maybe it's not writing music maybe it's not djing i i don't know what it may be but

1:02:20is that that ever crossed your mind oh yeah i make bad music or i enjoy making uh rhythms on my computer um uh definitely not uh locked in in a way where things are sounding how i want them to i'm a writer primarily with words um and i dj occasionally um but i enjoy listening to my friends more um yeah i mean

1:02:57it's a love for music it's a love for music that is under it all yeah well look and that's i think that's the beauty of love right and and music right you pour into areas of it it's not just one thing there's so many dimensions that sort of reward that love that you have and with that is

1:03:28you know there's a dimension we didn't talk about and that's the spiritual nature of music right and how it moves what we know to be things associated with the soul the the psyche the things that gratify us and so we are in this thing we are in music um in ways that i think ultimately provide not only

1:04:03ourselves with gratification but the but community right it allows us to connect to others and build community and this is house and with that i'm going to close out our show i want to begin by thanking randall dean singer songwriter producer and dj i clean too

1:04:35you got to see you got to see him perform i want to thank all the way from bloomington indiana chloe forte we will soon be able to attach howdy yeah a uh prefix um salutation uh to her name we definitely will have her back when that happens and um it's me just your main man mega i'm certainly humbled after tonight's show

1:05:05uh with um all the insights shared by our powerful powerful guests where if someone wanted to connect with either of you how and where could they do that we heard randall's got a band camp page for me if you guys want to follow me follow my spotify playlist just go to spotify and type in this is randall dean and that's got that's curated by me i update it weekly with any new tracks that dropped that i've collaborated with i just dropped a new club uh a remix from a local chicago band called

1:05:38a bootleg contraband at the songs called dead in the water it's also remixed by ron carroll and a couple other chicago locals that um that one just came out so it's always got something new and anything from petty davis my other alias if you like the more like darker like like more like where like warehousey vibe uh stuff that's that's my petty davis um thank you thank you thank you again randall for for being on the show chloe how about you linkedin i i've been off the social media uh linkedin i guess chloe forte or facebook i don't know if i will i probably won't see it maybe instagram but uh linkedin

1:06:17or indiana university's uh athlete musicology page so you can type me in awesome and you know you can find me and or my co-host of the vintage house show here on wnur every wednesday night 10 p.m central time we also have an incredible podcast where you can re-experience many of the 10 years now worth of

1:06:47interviews with um legends pioneers groundbreaking uh creatives like those on tonight's show uh you are also able to check out uh main man mega on instagram is where you can follow me i will look forward to rejoining uh the audience uh the audience either next week lori branch and i may be switching up

1:07:20and uh shout out to my co-host lori branch to our executive producer lauren lowry and to the entire vintage house show team uh dj mo mommy dj rocky floyd um we are uh over our time i want to thank you our audience for tuning in to another uh episode of the vintage house show and uh yes check us out wherever you enjoy your favorite podcast and we'll be back next week until then it's your main man thank you

1:07:55thank you thank you randall thank you chloe shout out emma nick getting locked in yes indeed thanks emma and nick and of course our in-studio producer mateo

1:08:13do you have a horn you have a horn it's you um i'd be remiss if on the uh somber note i didn't also uh shout out rest in peace uh dj lee collins and uh may uh may uh your contributions and uh your souls uh remain an ever uh present part of this community till next time everyone peace peace out thank you

1:08:48thanks for listening to the vintage house show podcast please subscribe and share and check us out live wnur 89.3 fm wednesdays at 10 o'clock