Henrik Schwarz: Live

Henrik Schwarz is a rare electronic producer who makes good on what it means to play "live." All of his tracks—a treasured string of 12-inch singles and remixes that synthesize house music's roots with its progressive outgrowths—register as genuine events, both in terms of their momentousness and in their sense of having happened in moments that couldn't again happen quite the same way after a given session ends. It's fitting, then, that Schwarz would introduce his work to CD with a "live" mix edited together from different club sets played on stray nights in sweaty rooms. Schwarz's sound is invariably soulful, whether he's toying with the melismatic voice of a house singer or pushing through an electronic riff that ebbs and flows. Piano proves integral, too—in ways that demonstrate how little difference there is between the act of playing binary keys and tweaking multivalent drum sounds when a skillful DJ goes to work.