“Deep house” is one of the most debased and confusing genre names — but if you ever want to show someone what it should mean, Chicago’s Ron Trent has the platonic ideal for you here. There’s three and a half hours of music here over 24 tracks, mostly previously released on Trent and Chez Damier’s Prescription label. Most are Trent solo with a couple of collabs with the likes of Damier, Peven Everett and Anthony Nicholson, all are very long and very repetitive, yet at the right time this is some of the most accessible and simply beautiful music ever made. Trent has an unerring ability to almost push the repetition too far, then hit you with a lush soul chord or dub wise effect, just at the moment you’re about to zone out. There are classic house vocals and pianos too, mind, but all are part of a perfect, sacred geometry.

This anthology of the mid-90s iconic deep house label Prescription is absolutely prized by deep house aficionados and contains some of the finest examples of this particular corner of the house music universe. Mostly Ron Trent in collaboration with Chez Damier or other artists, it’s the purest Chicago deep house — there are some lovely vocal samples and performances here and there — but these are tracks rather than songs. Instead of the traditional lyrics-with-verse-and-chorus structure that usually propels a song along, tracks instead circle back on themselves, often never resolving but basking in the build-up and the plateau and the end of teetering on the edge of something deep. 

The space afforded by this approach — were I a few drinks in, I might argue that the development of tracks as opposed to songs within house music is comparable to Miles Davis’ abandonment of traditional chord progressions in favour of Kind of Blue’s modal approach in terms of the new possibilities it presented, but they would have to be pretty strong drinks — leaves room for timbre, sonic texture and their emotional possibilities to become central, and Trent constructs his tracks with what sounds like a forensically intricate approach to production, with layers of hi-fidelity percussion Latin and Afro percussion complimenting his jacking drum machine beats, while synthetic chords, analogue soundwashes and expert sampling suggest, rather than play melodies. A house music highpoint.