A dive into Thee dark - Felix da Housecat’s weirdest, wildest work
It feels appropriate that Felix Da Housecat has had nine musical lives. There’s the electroclash hero, the rock-adjacent producer, the collaborator to the stars, the superstar DJ, the Prince-obsessed pop icon and… whatever he is today, somewhere between techno legend and EDM slipstream. Discogs lists 25 noms de plumes for the man born Felix Stallings Jr. and I doubt even he remembers them all.
Today, though, I want to go back before all that to the time when Felix was known as the weirdest, most tripped-out, artist in Chicago, a man capable or producing everything from the saddest psychedelia to the darkest techno and one of the most original producers that the electronic music world has ever seen. This is a dive into Thee dark…
Felix was a precocious talent, who made his first record at the age of 14 in the company of DJ Pierre. How exactly their contributions to Fantasy Girl were divided is lost to history, with Felix variously credited with writing, co-producing and playing keyboards on the 1987 Chicago hit.
Whatever the case, Fantasy Girl is a fantastically soft / hard piece of early Chicago house that marries tear-jerking keyboard melodies with jacking beats to produce something notably more sophisticated than a lot of the house music coming out of Chicago at the time, as if Pierre had put his vocals all over a particularly tough Pet Shop Boys B side, rather than a 14 year-old-kid’s first production.
After the release of Fantasy Girl, Felix dropped out of house music to attend Alabama State College, where he studied media and communication. When a girlfriend reignited his interest in dance music, Felix looked up DJ Pierre, who had moved to New York in 1990 to join Strictly Rhythm Records as an A&R. Pierre signed Felix and he made his debut (as Wizdom) in 1992 with Watcha Want / Sofie Bloo.
While this was, on the whole, a solid rather than remarkable solo debut, the Lights Out mix of Watcha Want hints at the unique talent that was soon to blossom, a minimal and rather haunting house track that teeters around the edge of a psychedelic wormhole, with its cosmic whale noises, 50s-style backing vocals (from Harrison Crump) and stuttering beat, but never quite plunges into the darkness.
Felix’s solo breakthrough came a year later with Thee Dawn, which was released on William Orbit’s Guerilla Records in 1993. (I’ve seen 1992 reported but I can’t find any evidence of this.) Guerilla was known for its progressive house, a term that in theory works for a track as futuristic as Thee Dawn. But if progressive house is neat, tidy and melodic, Thee Dawn is sprawling, scary and hypnotic, like being sucked into a deep, dark whirlpool or submitting to Kaa’s google eyes.
There’s no real melody to Thee Dawn, just an endless, labyrinthine series of slightly distressing noises and one vocal “oh” that swirls you into destruction. There’s an air of Pierre’s modishly relentless Wild Pitch sound to Thee Dawn and maybe a touch of techno - but nothing really sounds like Thee Dawn today, let alone back in 1993. A career-making masterpiece.
If I absolutely had to choose my favourite Felix Da Housecat record, it would be Thee Madkatt Courtship's By Dawns Early Light, an album that I once compared to “being dumped by your partner while coming down from a powerful LSD trip, or dreaming up a heartbreak you can dance to”.
The entire first half of the record is immaculate. Even so, the title song, which was first released in 1993 on the Thee Madkatt Courtship EP, is an obvious highlight for its epic melancholy, 11 minutes of house music that feels like the Grim Reaper is coming for your soul. If the maze from The Shining made house music it would sound like this and I can’t think of much bigger praise. (Da Mindfuck, on same record, is also stunning.)
Felix debuted the Aphrohead moniker in 1993 with a handful of remixes and the Thee Lite 12 inch on Bush. The original song is promising but it was the Dave Clarke remix that sent it into orbit, breaking the British producer in the US. So let’s say the plaudits are split. Felix made the original song, including the haunting vocal lines that have become so iconic; and Dave Clarke stripped it down to its bones and amped it up, creating a muscular beast that is powerful and creepy, an anthem with both Junior Vasquez and Adam X.
Every element here is driven to its absolute maximum, the kick drum hits like psychic pain, the hi-hats shower the eyes with splinters, the bass line threatens your foundations and there’s a siren noise all over the song like the apocalypse is upon us. Best of all, though, and absolutely fundamental to the song’s success, is Felix declaring “I can see the light” like a damaged prophet struggling to get over the darkness at the end of the world. In the Dark We Live is horribly massive - offensively massive, even. And there’s absolutely no escape from its gravity.
In a catalogue as wide and varied as Felix da Housecat’s, choosing two songs from one album for this list seems like an unbearable indulgence. And yet there was no way I couldn’t include Wet Wednesday, which opens Thee Maddkatt Courtship’s By Dawns Early Light, here
Wet Wednesday - and, honestly who the hell calls a techno tune Wet Wednesday? - is one of the most elegantly gloomy electronic songs ever written, a brilliantly judged melancholic slump of a record that has note-perfect vocal performances from Felix and Tyrone Palmer, matched by a wind-swept and yet oddly claustrophobic production, as if Felix made the record during a storm, when he was too scared to go outside.
Wet Wednesday is also one of the most enigmatic tunes I know, one that poses lots of questions and offers few answers. Why is Tyrone singing about a Wet Wednesday? What’s going to happen “any day now”? And will it be good or bad? Wet Wednesday raises emotions so disparate that I don’t know how to deal with them, a mixture of sadness, hope, despair and, perhaps, possibility.
Metropolis Present Day? “Thee Album” was going to be the record that broke Felix out of the underground, thanks to a deal with Belgian indie label Play It Again Sam. In a sign of ambition, Metropolis… was the first LP with the Felix da Housecat name on it and the record came with two co-productions from LFO’s Mark Bell, as well as piano, guitar and strings played by Paul Birchall.
By this point, Felix had established strong visual and verbal identities, thanks to his cat head logo and Prince-like obsession with “thees”, “dawns”, “Bloos” and more, all of which are present here. Metropolis… also contains everything that made early Felix so special musically, from the bitter-sweet melodies on Marine Mood to the basement-dark, elongated, almost trance-y production of Submarine or Footsteps of Rage.
Had Metropolis broken big, though, it would have been one of the most unsettlingly psychedelic records to do so since Pink Floyd’s The Piper At The Gates of Dawn, a record with which it shares a lot in spirit, if little in sound. The (kind of) title track best sums this up. It sounds like almost nothing else I have heard in techno, with a lopsided 6/8 shuffle (years before the brief Schaffel trend) and vocals that sound like they are blowing in and out on a sandstorm. Metropolis is nine minutes long and yet it appears to have nothing like a melody or structure, content instead to drift and wander where the currents may take it. And yet it is totally engaging.
Thee Madkatt Courtship’s second album, 1995’s Alone in the Dark, is the third pillar of Felix Da Housecat’s foundational trilogy, alongside Metropolis Present Day and By Dawns Early Light. And Wait For The Sun, which is the second song on Alone in the Dark, rivals anything in the Felix catalogue for emotional heft.
I’ve always said that I dislike those orchestral dance music albums, where people get crusty orchestras to replay electronic hits, from UK Garage to the work of Jeff Mills. This remains true, although Felix Da Housecat might be the only producer to make me even think about re-considering, so classically lush are some of his synth melodies.
Heaven Yes, from Alone In The Dark, is one example of this, its chord sequence making an unexpected left turn in a way that subverts the song’s initial uplift. But Wait For The Sun is all that and an exceptional vocal performance from long-time collaborator Harrison Crump that comes across like Romanthony lost in the fog of anguish or a disco Ian Curtis. Wait For The Sun is a brilliant song, in other words, which Felix’s production plunges into a hazy world of uncertainty.
While the divide is never that clear, Aphrohead tends to be the moniker that Felix Da Housecat uses for his darkest, deepest dance-floor tunes and the debut Aphrohead album, Thee Industry Made Me Do It!, is full of them. (It also has the quietly heart-breaking pop tune What It Was, so what do I know?)
The original Tunnel Vision was released on Thee Industry… in 1994 and it is raucous and ravey. But the Wild Pitch dub - which I think was released in 1996, although information is hard to find - is something else. It’s hard to describe the song without coming up with a mess of contradictions: the Wild Pitch dub is minimal but full; it’s small but imposing; structured but loose; long but oh too short; coherent but impossible to pin down. Sounds come at you forwards, backwards, dry then full of echo, and the effect is dangerously hypnotic, a song to get lost in and never find your way back out of. I’m not sure anyone but Felix can make music like this.
Felix released just two 12 inches as Thee Madkatt Chronicles and Vengeance of a Madman is on both of them. You can understand why.
The song is an outstanding example of pushing a minimal groove to bursting point, just an understated 303 burble, furious kick drum and a nerve-jangling noise that comes in and out, from which Felix pulls 10 minutes of paranoid, angry grooves, like classic Plastikman meets Minimal Nation. Vengeance of a Madman is a madness, perhaps; but a very controlled and controlling kind of madness, a revenge served steely cold, minimal and with maximum effect.
The distance from the lush grooves of Wait For The Sun to Vengeance of a Madman is enormous - and Felix bestrides it like a colossus. Richie Hawtin could have made Vengeance…; Mr. Fingers could have produced Wait For The Sun; but only Felix could have done them both,
Bonus track: Madkatt Courtship III - My Life Muzik
Like many dance music producers, Felix Da Housecat is a Prince obsessive; unlike many of his peers, though, Felix writes songs that Prince would be proud of. My Life Muzik, which was released in 1999 and, for me, puts an end to Felix’s first phase of musical life, is the classic example of this. Over a pleasantly understated synth and drum groove, Felix sings a beautifully simple ode to the music that has kept him going. Nothing more, nothing less; but the actual song is astounding.
In many ways, My Life Muzik resembles Stardust’s Music Sounds Better With You. The two songs have a similar message and in both cases the production is a masterclass in keeping things simple and letting the melody lead. But I think Felix’s tune is actually better.
My Life Muzik should have been a solar-system-sized hit. It wasn’t. But that doesn’t detract from what is a definitive dance classic, one that also, rather neatly, sends us right back stylistically the simple grooves of Fantasy Girl, from where we can only start again.
Some listening
I was introduced to the music of Charif Megarbane, a Lebanese producer, composer and multi-instrumentalist, by the always excellent Habibi Funk
label, which has released a number of his records over the past few years, his funky, psychedelic and eminently swayable guitar sound reminding me of Serge Gainsbourg as refracted through Air. (His 2025 album Hawalt, incidentally, comes highly recommended.)
Odd Forms is (I think) a new song, released on the Land 02 compilation from Tunefork Studios, which raises money for those displaced by Israeli attacks on Lebanon. It shows Megarbane at his gently intricate best, the acoustic guitar and drum beats waltzing around each other, while an electric guitar swoons all over the song, as if in a fit of melancholy. Odd Forms makes me think of the pocket majesty of Sébastien Tellier’s La Ritournelle, which is praise indeed. (And hat tip to Philip Sherburne and his Futurism Restated newsletter for introducing the compilation.)
There’s a distinct whiff of LFO to 73 Fil, the first taste of Superabundance’s forthcoming Up-World EP, in the track’s metallic and minimal electro beat and robotic bass line. But it is LFO with a sense of humour and a head full of madness, as the track dissolves into wafted pink air of psychedelic production, like Tied Up portrayed by The Magic Roundabout.
As a rule I avoid songs with words like “hypno” and “trance” in the title, as they tend to be shorthand for “does very little” and “doesn’t even do that very well”. But Donato Dozzy is made from sterner stuff and his Hypno Trance 0, from the forthcoming Hypno Trance EP, doesn’t do very much but does it all with overwhelming style and finesse, creating a rolling synth effect that cannons around the brain like an industrial rubber band between the ears.
(PS both recommendations taken from Shawn Reynaldo’s First Floor newsletter, which rolled into my inbox right when I was bemoaning the lack of good new tunes.)
If you’ve even been vaguely online for the past month you will have heard of Angine de Poitrine, a Quebecois duo who make microtoned math rock sound like the funnest thing you could imagine on a bright summer day. Math rock isn’t my thing, on the whole, although I keep a piece of my heart for anything as funky, cheeky and cleverly-stupid as Fabienk, which opens the duo’s new album Vol. II, a song like when Battles went full-on glam gremlin on Atlas. I can only imagine how wonderful Angine would be live.
As I grow older, my favourite Jeff Mills tracks are the calmer, weirder and funkier ones. The Maze, from the recent Whatever The Case EP, is all three, a combination of sickly, detuned chords, a jerky drum machine rhythm and a saxophone lick that might be uplifting if it wasn’t in such off-putting company. Mills is one of those people who fervently believes in techno as an ever-evolving musical art and when he releases something as avant as The Maze I am inclined to agree.
The Black Warhols - People Understand
If you were expecting goth, shoegaze, industrial and trip hop from Alan Oldham AKA The Black Warhols AKA Underground Resistance’s Minister of Information then you were probably paying closer attention to his career than I was. And good on you.
Oldham’s new Famous For Fifteen Minutes EP as The Black Warhols includes a carnival ghost house cover of David Essex’s Rock On; We Are Dead Rock Stars, a 12-minute piece of ambient guitar dub, which comes across like a gothic Seefeel; Choke, which splits the difference between Nine Inch Nails and Gary Numan; the immaculately titled When In Doubt Wear Black and - best of all - the hook-laden My Bloody Valentine acid hop house of People Understand. This is a record that genuinely stopped me in my tracks.
1978 called and it wants the funkiest shit ever back. Yes Assa’d Khoury’s break and organ classic Al Ghaba is almost as old as me but its parent album Electronic Touches Belly Dance is getting a reissue by the good people at Wewantsounds in June and Christ this song just kills, tumbling percussion meeting jaunty organ runs and what sounds a little like a stylophone, as the break finally kicks in. Then everything spirals.
Things I’ve done
Line Noise podcast - With Calibre
I always love it when people want to really get into it in an interview. And this was definitely the case on the Line Noise podcast this week, where the guest was Dominick Martin, AKA Calibre. Over the course of an hour, we spoke about everything from Martin's lack of confidence in his voice to his upbringing in 80s Belfast, passing by Lankum, Sun Ra, Swerve, perfect pitch, bringing his parents to gigs and what his daughter thinks of his music. His new album, Tricklemore Sea (released May 1) also features heavily in the interview.
One Minute Review - Thundercat’s Distracted
Don’t watch this video - in which I review Thundercat’s awesome new album in an alleged 60 seconds - for my face or words. Instead, bathe in the wonder of the RPS video team’s incredible video editing skills, which make me look far more interesting than I deserve to be.
Tier List - The best of David Bowie post Tin Machine
In our latest Tier List for Radio Primavera Sound Johann and I get deep into David Bowie’s post-Tin Machine catalogue, a surprisingly fertile field. What’s the best? What’s the worst? And what's underrated? You’ll have to watch here to see.
The playlists
Felix Da Housecat
Would call them “thee playlists”
But I’m not Felix.
Sadly.
Apple Music: The newest and bestest 2026.
Spotify: the newest and bestest 2026.
Apple Music: The newest and the bestest
Spotify: The newest and the bestest.
