BLOG 05/05/2020
The Jan Diaries — A Few Words on Mike Huckaby from Detroit
Mike Huckaby died at the beginning of May 2020, and Jan Kinčl used that month’s entry of The Jan Diaries to write about him. The framing is deliberate: Huckaby is described as someone who came to electronic music properly and for the right reasons, and whose influence ran through channels that never showed up on a record sleeve.
What the piece covers
Two of those channels get named. Through the 1990s Huckaby worked at Record Time, the Detroit shop that functioned as the scene’s hub, where a generation of local DJs and producers took his recommendations and let them shape their taste. Later, through Youthville, he ran workshops around the world — Kinčl notes the reach, from Detroit to Melbourne — teaching young musicians and pushing them toward a voice of their own; Kyle Hall is the name he cites as the most visible result. When the obituaries appeared, Kinčl singles out Hall’s piece for Resident Advisor as the most personal of them and the New York Times obituary as the best written. His own contact was more modest: the two met around a decade earlier during one of Huckaby’s visits to Croatia, and Huckaby later came on as a guest on Kinčl’s Radio 808 show, where a man with a reputation for being quiet gave two hours that were both entertaining and instructive.
The second half is a listening guide of six recordings. There is the classic deep house side — warm atmosphere and chords laid over the dependable grooves that were his signature. There is an early release that others have described as sunny, laid-back deep house and that Kinčl flatly contradicts, calling it a raw house killer whose hypnotic repetition works equally in a techno set and a house set. There is a remix that shows his restraint, a handful of well-chosen elements built into loops that carry themselves. There is Melodies From The Jazz Republic from 2005, the record he returns to when he needs to recalibrate toward dancefloor fundamentals and repetition, and which holds up at three in the morning and at home in the afternoon alike. There is a DeepChord remix tucked on a B-side that outplays the original and stands as his best dub techno, close to Basic Channel territory. And there is the legendary edit of Sun Ra’s UFO, where a few small corrections to the arrangement made a jazz composition function in a club.
The part that stayed
What the column keeps returning to is not the discography but the manner: “Mike je jedan od onih ljudi čija strast i predanost izlazi iz svake riječi” — one of those people whose passion and dedication comes through in every word. Kinčl also points readers toward the 2005 compilation In The Dark (The Soul Of Detroit), released by the Chicago label Still Music, for anyone whose path somehow never crossed Huckaby’s.
Read the full piece
The full column, in Croatian, is on Red Bull Croatia. Five minutes.
The Jan Diaries | Nekoliko riječi o Mike Huckabyju iz Detroita → redbull.com