Once more, with feeling

INTRINSIC VALUE With Tom Middleton on the decks, this week's Basic NYC bash is a bargain.

Talking to the U.K.'s Tom Middleton, who's spinning at Basic NYC's fifth-anniversary party on Saturday 25, is a bit like taking a ride on a verbal Tilt-A-Whirl. Within the span of a few minutes, a conversation careens from DJ Swamp setting his hands on fire during a long-ago gig at the Winter Music Conference to the Mighty Boosh, the brilliance of orchestral arrangers and his favorite New York restaurants. (That list includes Nobu, by the way.) But speak long enough, and eventually he'll end up opining on his favorite subject: house music.

"My love affair with house is still strong," Middleton, 37, admits. "I'm still deeply enamored, perhaps more than ever, of this movement that never seems to go away. The long and short of is that our generation, the one that's grown up on acid house, techno and golden-era deep house, we don't want to ever turn our backs on it."

It's specifically that "golden era" that's consuming Middleton's hyperactive mind at the moment. The DJ and producer—who kicked off his electronic music career in 1991 working with Richard "Aphex Twin" James, and who since has been responsible (often together with frequent partner Mark Pritchard) for some of house music's most sublime moments—is about to release One More Tune, a collection of dopamine-elevating classics (beloved tracks like Last Rhythm's "Last Rhythm" and Rhythim Is Rhythim's "Strings of Life") all reedited or remixed by Middleton himself.

"The whole point of doing One More Tune was to analyze what it was that makes one piece of music more special than the others," Middleton says. "What makes a tune a celebratory, end-of-night anthem? The crowd is screaming, the lights go on, the security guards are going, ‘C'mon, turn everything off. Go, go, go'—but then the promoter gives you a wink, and you're given the chance to play one final piece of music to send people on their way. What do you choose? It's a really interesting question—what makes one tune more appropriate for that situation than another? I've been trying to figure that out myself, in various ways, for years."

One of his explorations into that mystery involved creating his own end-of-the-party track, specifically last year's piano-pounding stunner, "Remember the Love." As he describes that song's genesis, one gets a sense of how Middleton's restive mind works. "I was working on these compilations of crazy cover versions, and that got me thinking about what makes a classic tune," he recalls. "At the same time I was thinking about celebrating the 20th anniversary of acid and house and our Summer of Love [1988, basically the year the U.K. discovered acid house and Ecstasy]. And then I was playing a set at the Big Chill Festival, and I was deejaying in front of 40,000 people—how do you hold onto them all? I decided to cram in as many Summer of Love–style anthems as possible. So I started with that classic remix of ‘You've Got the Love' by the Source with Candy Staton, but just the bleeps—ba ba ba, ba ba ba, ba ba ba.… Once I finally let the track play, it was amazing—everyone was singing, the parents and their kids! Those bleeps are kind of the motif on which I based ‘Remember the Love,' mixed with references to bits from other classic tunes, like Phase II's ‘Reachin',', all redefined for the modern dance floor. That's what got me thinking about what makes an anthem, which then led me to One More Tune."

Of course, Middleton isn't the sort to stick with one shtick for long—as evidenced by "Kalahari," a beautiful unreleased Afro-tech track on his MySpace page (myspace.com/tommiddleton). "‘Kalahari' seems like it might be the closest to what might be my next format," he says. "I've been getting excited by what you might call minimal house mixed with ethnic, tribal sounds—which is actually nothing new, since everything's cyclical.…" Then, in true Middleton fashion, he veers off into a discussion on Danny Tenaglia, hardcore techno, the Swedish House Mafia and a thousand other threads, all of them utterly spellbinding.

Tom Middleton spins at Basic NYC Sat 25; One More Tune (Renaissance) is out Mon 27.

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