How I Process Music

a short one on how I think about music, plus a playlist demo

I found this song a couple of months ago, ‘Professor 3’ released by Professor Rhythm in 1991 (and re-released in 2018) via a DJ I follow, and couldn’t shake it out of my occipital lobe. More than just being Real Music produced and mixed perfectly, it felt like a missing link of sorts, a step in between certain forms and varieties of electric jazz, funk, Chicago house, and Afro-break beats, bridging them to the spacier nineties’ house and neo-disco that would follow, as well as the deep Detroit house of artists like Moodymann developing around the same time. Tracking certain forms of diasporic output across time and industry is how I make sense of music and remember it in my head, bundled into timelines and sound maps that relate songs and albums to one another, so I thought I’d take the opportunity to make a playlist centered around Professor 3 that demonstrates the linkages I was trying to articulate in my cranium. Please enjoy: the link to the playlist is here, let me know what you think and if you hear what I’m talking about.