Friday Night Jams 1985 - Hot Mix 5 WBMX Chicago

The Mixcloud page of United Sounds of America, established in 2018, has only uploaded sporadically; there hasn’t been a new one in a year. “I do not own the original tape recordings,” the page notes. “They have been sourced from P2P networks over a long period of time.” What makes it valuable is that the 21 shows it does contain are a gold mine.

This set is a prime example. It was uploaded sometime in 2020, one of the most recent as we near the end of 2021, and it’s fascinating. The track list, available on the mix’s page, is like something you’d make a spreadsheet to come up with—an exact distillation of the time and place and proclivities that make up so much early Chicago house music, of which Farley, of course, was one of the city’s leading DJs. The trickery is fascinating—you can hear him audibly up the BPM as he starts up Savage Process’s “Heart Begin to Beat.” That one comes out of an irresistibly bubbly pair of R&B numbers by Skipworth & Turner and Rose Royce—the kind of segue we might take for granted in good part because Chicagoans refused to see any distinction between them.