Only 4 U: The Sound of Cajmere & Cajual Records (1992-2012)

The first wave of Chicago house music was shaped by the radical innovations of DJs and producers like Frankie Knuckles, Jesse Saunders, and Mr. Fingers. But as the genre's popularity expanded and house's metronomic pulse began to infiltrate the pop and R&B mainstream in the early ‘90s, Curtis “Cajmere” Jones kept the music's underground spirit alive with his austere, frighteningly beautiful productions on the Cajual label. Jones inaugurated the Cajual imprint in 1991 with “Coffee Pot (It’s Time for the Percolator),” a hard-jacking house track that complicated the steady pulse of the Roland 909 drum machine with strange, percussive blipping sounds that resemble nothing so much as a dot-matrix printer gone berserk. It’s only appropriate that this retrospective of Jones’ most revolutionary productions for the Cajual label should open with this classic track, but listeners who are only familiar with the controlled chaos of Jones’ hits like “Percolator” and “Brighter Days” owe it to themselves to explore the entirety of this 29-track retrospective.