Too Many Classics (To Be Left With Little or No Protection)

Seven tracks of purest distilled Detroit deep house from one of the city’s major proponents, this collection, released in 2017, was actually DJ, producer, engineer, and music educator Mike Huckaby’s first album, despite a production career that began back in 1995 with his debut on fellow Detroit-er Rick Wade’s Harmonie Park label. This collection, released on Huckaby’s own Deep Transportation label, collects and remasters some of his finest mid-90s house tunes. 

The sound is the clean, efficient, underground deep house of mid-90s Detroit, based around inherently in-the-pocket grooves, the rhythm tracks constructed of endless variations of 4/4 kick drums, sparking, shuffling hi-hats, and sharp-edged claps and snares. Huckaby’s flavour of house — as befits someone steeped in Detroit’s electronic music history — was sophisticated and restrained, with jazz-inflected chords, spacey sound beds, and relentless rolling rhythms. Essential mid-90s Detroit deep house.