Boo Williams

Some of the best Chicago House Music of the ’90s was released on what have essentially become “ghost labels”, existing in some limbo between a lost youth and legal opportunism (watch, for instance, the flood of Romanthony “tributes” that are sure to fly in the wake of the brilliant House Music pioneer’s passing in May 2013). A great deal of Boo Williams’ best work from 1996 through the early years of this century were on labels that only notionally exist now.

One was Fruits of the Spirit, an EP pressed by an Ohio label called Three to Five, which was a sublabel of Dirty Loop, which (following discogs links like Indiana Jones tracing a finger across an ancient map) seems to have been devoured by another sublabel called Mush. The two B-side tracks, “Crying Black Man” and “Changes” are rescued from out-of-stock and out-of-print obscurity by Noble Square, which gives them a full 12″ of their own. If you know Boo Williams, you know this period of his music, epitomized and never surpassed after “Changes” – downtempo but thoroughly electronic, with arching synths rising above the din more in the manner of classic funk than classic house.