Hanna - The Never End EP

Pitchfork 76

Few terms have been as widely abused in the electronic musical lexicon as “deep house”—a phrase that has come to stand for glossy surfaces and a sedated pulse, an EDM for grown ups that flouts its maturity via half-hearted sax samples. Trace the genre’s history back to the late 1980s and early 1990s, however—to the work of Blaze, Kerri Chandler, and Larry Heard—and you will find something rather different. Back then, no one was consciously trying to create deep house. Instead, the label was used to describe a kind of house music that was slower, moodier, and jazzier than usual.

Hanna—aka Cleveland producer Warren Harris—fits firmly into this mold. He is one of those quietly legendary American electronic artists, overlooked in his own backyard but hugely respected overseas. Harris is a don of expansive house now into almost 20 years of releasing music, more into the chords themselves than the tricky business of dancing. The Never End, a new six-track EP, is unlikely to change his relative anonymity. Nothing here screams of a commercial breakthrough, and at times—as with the inclusion of ill-fitting drum and bass track “Deceptiv”—you feel like Harris is too wrapped up in his own musical universe to care. And yet The Never End proves to be a fantastic example of deep house alchemy, a release that shows how to navigate the paper-thin line between deep and dull, soulful and soulless.

The key tracks are the three straight-ish house numbers—“Punk,” “July,” and “Twombly’s Glen”—which are bookended by noodling, pleasantly forgettable ambient numbers in “Being” and “When.” Much like Larry Heard before him, Harris uses a small number of musical ingredients—jazz-inflected chords, burbling bass lines, and swinging drum machines—but rings a musical magic out of them, where what counts is not piling on the layers but finding precisely the right sounds to create a melodic mood.

It is striking, particularly on “Punk” and “July,” just how melancholic the results can be, a world of blue notes and extended musical funks. Near the start of “Punk” is a spoken word vocal that sounds on the verge of tears—“I just can’t fight,” the choked voice intones, “I know you understand”—to which Harris adds elegiac chord swoops, the flutter of an acoustic guitar, and a wandering synth line. The effect is quietly devastating. “July” is even more moving, as a perfect two-second snatch of melody is layered over a descending, aquatic synth run, an eerie clip of saxophone, and a shuffling house beat. There’s almost nothing to the song, but each element is finely weighted for maximum emotional heft, creating a tears-on-the-dance-floor moment that is straight out of the Satoshi Tomiie songbook.

After this sustained melancholia, “Twombly’s Glen” feels like a walk on a summer’s day with the sun on your face. Its palette is similar to “Punk” and “July,” with the syncopated chatter of hi-hats and sustained synth washes, but the song’s circular, airy melody suggests the hopeful ecstasy of love, overlaid by the joyful patter of keyboard riffs that flutter right out of the speakers. On these three songs, The Never End is house music with a beating human heart. It’s an arm around the shoulder and a cathartic swing on the dancefloor rather that a selfie and a fist bump. It’s house music that hurts and isn’t afraid to cry. More than deep, it is profound.