Ten City - Whatever Makes You Happy (New York City Mix)

1990. http://www.discogs.com/release/223065

Gorgeous David Morales remix. First heard this on a trip to NYC at the end of 1990, got taken to Sound Factory for the first time where Frankie Knuckles was playing - it was a total revelation, I'd never heard or seen anything like it. Had a pristine system that sounded like the world's largest, loudest, bassiest audiophile hi fi and a thousand or so mainly black & latino gay men and women going off to tracks like this, singing along to the chorus ("whatever makes you...HAPPY!!") and whooping and hollering when it dropped down to the bassline. Space was a completely raw warehouse that was dominated by the dancefloor, big speaker stack in each corner and huge mirror ball in the center. No alcohol, just a juice bar, free fruit and water fountain. Amazing dancers and a fluid, rhythmic physicality seeming to flow through everyone on the floor (and pretty much the whole club was the floor!). Very distinctive metallic smell of joints laced with angel dust and just a little undercurrent of sex and danger; totally thrilling. Can only remember two other tracks from that morning: Underground Solution - Luv Dancin and Those Guys - Tonite. Hard to convey how different NYC was back then. One thing about the Factory system that's kind of hard to explain if you've not heard anything like it is that never, ever did it hurt your ears, and you could hold a conversation on the dancefloor despite the loudness, because the separation of frequencies was so pure. There really aren't words to describe how good tracks like this sounded through it.

Two photos of the club around that time by Scotto: http://scientitian.com/images/FrankieSoundFactory.jpg

Photos of Frankie Knuckles in the Sound Factory booth: http://scientitian.com/weblog/?p=859