Westcoast House — Finding a Name for My Sound

I was collecting Westcoast House before I knew Westcoast House existed.
For several years, I bought records that belonged to the same musical world.
I recognised connections between artists, labels and sounds. There was just one thing I didn’t know.
Apparently, it had a name. I only discovered that much later. My introduction to the sound itself came around the year 2000.

And, as so often, it started with another DJ (Hello, Jürgen)
Somewhere in Between Around 2000, something was changing in House music. The House and Disco House sound
I had listened to and played during the previous years was still around, but personally, I was beginning to lose interest in it.
I was playing a lot of Deep House instead. I loved the music, but there was a problem. Getting people onto a dancefloor with
some of the deeper stuff could be difficult. Let’s be fair. Some of it was a little boring.

At the same time, Minimal was becoming increasingly important. I found the occasional record I liked,
but it never really became my sound either. So I was somewhere in between. I knew what I didn’t want anymore.
I wasn’t entirely sure what I wanted next. Then I met Jürgen through the nightlife scene. And Jürgen had records.

What Is That? The music he played seemed to sit exactly in the space I had been looking for.
It had some of the depth and atmosphere I liked in Deep House, but it had more drive.
The kicks were harder. There was much more emphasis on percussion. And underneath it all were these rolling basslines
that kept the tracks moving. Add some Deep House chords and perhaps a short vocal fragment, and you are getting
very close to the sound that caught me. The vocal fragments were important too. By now, there seems to be a recurring
theme in these stories. Give me a short vocal sample and I am perfectly happy. Give me verses and a chorus and we may have a problem.

But at the time, I wasn’t analysing any of this. I just knew that Jürgen was playing records I wanted.
So I did what I always did. I wrote down names, artists, labels. And started searching.

Schallrausch

Around that time, finding records was also beginning to change. The record shop was no longer the only place to discover music.
Online record shops were becoming increasingly useful, and one of them soon became particularly important to me: Schallrausch.
They had a lot of records in exactly this style. So I bought them. A lot of them.
After a period in which I had been unsure where my musical taste was heading, I suddenly had that feeling again.
I had found my sound. Artists such as DJ Buck, DJ Rasoul, Hipp-E and Blakkat became familiar names.
So did labels such as Siesta Music, Tango Recordings, Bluem Recordings and Nightshift.
But the search didn’t stop on the American West Coast. Records by artists such as Swirl People and Inland Knights, and releases
on labels such as Aroma and Drop Music, fitted naturally alongside them in my collection. To me, they belonged together.
I still didn’t have a name for what connected them.

Westcoast House

Years later, somewhere online, I came across a term I had never really noticed before: Westcoast House.
And suddenly, things made sense. There was a name for this musical world I had already been collecting for years.
The “West Coast” in Westcoast House points towards the House scenes that developed along the American West Coast, with places
such as the San Francisco Bay Area and San Diego becoming important centres for DJs, producers, parties and labels.
But I have never thought of Westcoast House as a strict geographical rule. For me, the term also describes a sound.
And that sound travelled. Music did not suddenly stop being Westcoast House to my ears because the producer happened to live somewhere else.

If I had to describe it without using genre labels, I would probably do it like this:
Take some of the chords and atmosphere of Deep House. Give the kick a little more weight. Add plenty of percussion. Put a
rolling bassline underneath it. And perhaps throw in a short vocal sample.
Somewhere in there is the sound I came to know as Westcoast House. Of course, somebody else might simply call
the same record Deep House. Or Tech House. And they wouldn’t necessarily be wrong. A Genre Without Clear Borders

That is perhaps one of the things I like most about the term. Westcoast House has never felt like a perfectly defined genre.
Even among people who know a lot about House music, it is not a term I hear particularly often. Most of the records I associate with it
could easily be placed in another category. Some lean deeper. Some are more percussive. Some move closer to Tech House.
There is no clear border where Deep House ends and Westcoast House begins. I don’t think there needs to be one.

For me, it describes a particular musical family better than any of the larger genre names do. It connects places and scenes with a sound
that eventually travelled far beyond them. And strangely, I understood the sound long before I understood the connection.

Giving It a Place That is also why Westcoast House has its own genre in The Tribute Mix Show archive.
I could have put all those mixes under Deep House or Tech House. Technically, that would probably work.
But something would be missing. When I see the words Westcoast House, I don’t just see a genre category. I think about discovering
Jürgen’s records around 2000. I think about writing down artists and labels I had never heard of. I think about Schallrausch and the excitement
of finding more and more records that seemed to fit into this sound I was looking for.
And I remember the feeling of finally having found a musical direction that felt right again. Years later, the internet gave me a name for it.

The music had already done the important part.