Kerri Chandler – Spaces and Places

I couldn’t wait for the release of this album, and when it finally arrived, I had no idea how to write about it.

The cover art of Spaces and Places is based on a heat map of the Big Bang – an ambitious metaphor for a 24-track epic compiled by Kerri Chandler, each one recorded live at a different club around the world.

More than anything, it is an anthology of homages – to cities that harbour and inspire electronic music scenes, the pioneering venues that host them, and house music as an inescapable movement that took over the world. Through Big Bang, the universe was born – and with it, house music.

Clocking in at three hours, it goes without saying the album is long – but it is only in length that the endless nature of the genre itself can even begin to be discovered.

In each space across every place (!), you can hear how the distinct soul of cities and the heart of each club directs every track. It may be conceptual, but the album captures that indescribable metamorphosis that takes places across dancefloors, through live instrumentation or edits, and Chandler’s unique blends that cater to specific venues and crowds.

There’s tributes to ’90s producers, now-defunct club nights, nods to genres that have spawned from the choral vocals, hi-hats and sax swings. It dances, it weaves, it sings the beauty of music and the places we’ve discovered, felt, heard and remembered it.

There’s no point doing a track-by-track – but that isn’t because it isn’t worth it; merely, they are big-room bangers with geographic and experiential memories that stand alone and deserve to be experienced and relished according to what they mean to you.

So whether you stick it on shuffle, work through the classics you know, or pick the clubs that remind you of better days, this is a uniquely personal album for each listener that has somehow managed to bring an entire genre, scene, place, world, together on one album.

And for that, there has never been a title more appropriate nor a DJ more capable of such a feat than Kerri Chandler.