Somewhere in my mind Ricardo Miranda is still a youngblood, like a movie star you haven’t seen for awhile who stays eternal youthful while the rest of us age and the world goes to shit. Back then, he was a cat locked away in a home studio, discovering dynamic new derivations and departures on the sound established by the progenitors of deep house from Chicago and smuggling these secret weapons into the crates of an underground cabal of DJs from around the world. He’s still doing that stuff, but he’s been doing it long enough that he’s got a vault of unreleased tracks, some of which are (somehow!) nearly 20 years old.
The Deep & The Lost (A Collection Of Lost Music) is a long EP or short LP of tracks written between 2004 and 2010. They were never released because, as Miranda says, none of his peers at the time were doing music that sounded anything like this. When you put this record on now, I think you’ll find that there is still nobody doing music that sounds like this.
What is that sound? Listen to “Heirs of Rhythms,” and you would tag this one as “tribal,” with big sweeping waves. Nothing rare there, but listen closer: you can’t escape how visceral this music is. The bass drum doubles your heartbeat and hits somewhere deep, a place inside that’s mute, frightened and alive, a place that only music can reach. All the tracks here seem to work from a common template — they initially sound like other things you’ve heard but then massively subvert the blueprint they’re working from. “Soulizm” appears to be the kind of analog beat track familiar to fans of Eargasmic, Obsolete Music Technology and other raw and stripped down Chicago house/techno labels and artists, but with a warm, bouncy beat that sparks a highwire Arp 2600-esque sound, like a powerful but shortlived arclight. This is deeply emotional stuff and it’s hard to get out of your bloodstream once it gets under your skin.
“Turntable Blues” starts off with a steely drum pattern, familiar from some vintage +8 releases and their imitators, but leaps off into a blissful unknown, thrown about by powerful currents and geothermal vents. The drums sizzle as if they’re singed, a phenomenon that continues on “Burnt Grooves.”
The Deep & The Lost appears to be not just a description of the tracks but maybe the state of mind of the person who made them and the ones who will warm themselves by their heat today. According to the liner notes, these six tracks were “created during a time of deep pain from a few events but mainly from the passing of my parents. None of my peers were doing music like this at the time so I didn’t do anything with them. They felt too underground.” I think they’re still too underground for a lot of DJs working in this field. But Miranda succeeded in burying his soul in this record. You can hear it in there, trying to work itself out.
Ricardo Miranda: The Deep & The Lost (A Collection of Lost Music) (Noble Square / 12″ Vinyl)
A1. Ricardo Miranda: “Heirs Of Rhythms” (5:26)
A2. Ricardo Miranda: “Soulizm” (4:54)
A3. Ricardo Miranda: “Turntable Blues” (5:29)
B1. Ricardo Miranda: “118 Deep Vibes” (5:05)
B2. Ricardo Miranda: “Storm Clouds” (5:32)
B3. Ricardo Miranda: “Burnt Grooves Outro” (3:12)
⚪️ Disclosure Statement: This record was submitted as a promo.
Previous Coverage:
SELECT: The Sound of Roots Underground (2022)
Alton Miller drops the bejeweled Summer Sessions EP (2021)
Patrice Scott & Ricardo Miranda team up on Rhythm Nation (2021)
Alton Miller & Bo team up on “Where Did We Go Wrong?” (2021)
Ricardo Miranda: A 5 Mag Mix vol 43 (2017)
