Deal with it
François K likes it deep and sexy, OK?

By Amanda Nowinski

FRAN&CCEDIL ;ois K was feelin' it at the Loft before club kids were conceived, made records a decade before ravers decided to wear big pants, and compiled a discography the size of Ten 15 two decades before hos and yuppies started getting wiggly with it at Ruby Skye. So if any of you underground cynics have a problem with the man calling his mix CD Deep and Sexy, you already know where to stick it.

But I feel your pain. After all, nothing sounds more cornball and passé these days than the term deep house, particularly to those who live and die by memories of its good old days. Today's deep house scene conjures frightening visions of champagne 'n' GHB VIP rooms in Ibiza and buffed, plastic-looking cokeheads whose intellects are about as expansive as a shitty hit of E. Incidentally, most of the music is not half as deep, soulful, or funky as the skinny Ikea couch you are about to pass out on.

"Well, deal with it," François tells me over the phone from the offices of his Wave Music record label in New York. "I've been dealing with it all these years, so you may as well deal with it too. What do you think it feels like to go to the store every week and hear 150 new records that all sound like crap? In the disco days there may have been 10 records, and 9 sounded like crap. But at least you had a 1-in-10 batting average."

Quibbling over clubland hipness is immeasurably beneath François, who put his production mark on three crucial phases of modern dance music: disco, new wave, and house. As a DJ he's held down landmark gigs at the Paradise Garage (as Larry Levan's fill-in), Studio 54 at its peak, seminal garage clubs like Zanzibar and Better Days, and currently, Body and Soul, a Manhattan Sunday party that borrows from the eclectically uplifting Paradise aesthetic. A 21-year-old François Kevorkian moved to New York from Paris in 1975 to pursue a career in drumming and quickly fell in love with nascent disco. Three years later he landed an A&R position at Prelude Records, a groundbreaking independent funk-disco label that released work from innovators such as D-Train and the Strikers. Since the early '80s, he's produced and remixed an absurd number of artists, ranging from Kraftwerk, Cabaret Voltaire, and Yaz to Midnight Oil, Jody Watley, Jimmy Cliff, and even, uh, Foreigner. In 1994 he opened his own label, Wave Music, where he releases everything from organic house to Brazilian jazz. François has made extreme diversity of styles his preeminent goal, so imagine how he must feel today, wading through a dance music scene that is more clique-driven than a high school lunch break.

"It didn't used to be like that," he says, gearing up to lay it on me again. "It didn't used to be where people who were into hip-hop would only listen to hip-hop. [The dance music scene] has refined and distilled itself into a very musically segregated bunch of little territories that really don't have much to do with each other. Some DJs try to cross boundaries, but for the most part, it's turning everyone into a whole bunch of conservatives." Come again? "Conservatives. Oh yes, conservatives. Terribly conservative. They are unable to accept any ideas except a narrow version of what they like."

Talk of stagnancy rumbles through the dance music scene today. "It's a tough time for dance believers," dance music's leading old-guard British critic, Simon Reynolds, writes in the February issue of Spin. "Clubland chugs along with bland floor fodder – trance, so-called 'progressive,' filter house – DJ'd by soulless technicians marketed as globe trotting pseudo personalities. On the underground tip, you can choose between a deep-house scene stuck back in the over-mythologized day, or the blink-and-you'll-miss-them succession of left-field subgenres...."

The notion of a dance music depression rings all the more significant coming from Reynolds, who has a vested, career-minded interest in the continuation of the music. But while Reynolds is not impressed with current beats, the root of the problem is perhaps not the quality of the music, it's that the industry has cornered itself into inaccessible, minute niche markets, most of which are impossible for curious outsiders to penetrate. For example, try explaining the difference between hard house, click hop, and nu skool breaks to someone who's just beginning to get his or her ass around – god forbid – Fatboy Slim. Innovative music is being made, but because there's little communication between genre mobs, quality tracks from all camps are instantly streamlined to compartmentalized audiences. Consequently, the best music doesn't reach new listeners. The dance music scene has morphed into a complex social structure that's divided by embarrassingly shallow restrictions – beat structure, tempo, and haircut, to name a few. "I don't know where to place the blame," François says. "I don't know if it's the fault of the DJ, the promoter, or the customer."

But he's doing his best to explode the genre quagmire. At Body and Soul, he and DJ-producers Joe Claussell and Danny Krivit play whatever they like and keep it decidedly antilinear, moving from jazzy drum 'n' bass to rare groove, from house to hip-hop. The Wave Music catalog also reflects François's diversity stance, with artists such as Cape Verdean singer Cesaria Evora, Dominican percussionist and producer ChiChi Peralta, and producer-engineer to the dance heavyweights Matthias Heilbronn (who learned production skills from François at François's late '80s-born Axis recording studios). François clearly hears music from a stylistically expansive perspective – after all, no sane drummer is content with playing just one rhythm.

The Deep and Sexy mix will not bend your mind with revolutionary new sounds – this is, quite simply, a selection of the best house music from his label. Even if these grooves aren't giving birth to yet another annoying dance music microgenre, the music holds fast to the two adjectives old-school house lovers dream of late at night, when they should be out owning it somewhere hot and dark: yep, deep and sexy. There's a comfortable, natural rhythm you can sink your body into – this is not music for the aesthetically cracked out – and the bittersweet sense of melody keeps the ride deliciously freakier than a perfectly in-sync house club at 2 a.m. Francois starts the journey with a hypnotic drum buildup from Fluid X and then entices the melodic soul with "Do Ya Like It (Body and Soul Dub)," by Blue 6 (Naked Music's Jay Denes). The mind leaves the body for a while with the percussion-heavy "Omato Grosso," by ADNY, and Sun Orchestra's "Driftin'." Next, François turns up the sass with the galloping beats and street-talking lyrics of Nathan Haines's irresistible "Earth Is the Place" and then lifts away from reality and toward the outer planets with his own dubbed-out "Enlightenment." His trademark dub sensibility pulses through each track, but he never flattens the ecstatic nature of the mix with too much laid-back stoner trickery. In short, François does exactly what a DJ is meant to do: tell the dancer a dynamic, intuitive story.

The cohesive elements that François brings to the mix are a reflection of his enviable past. I ask him to recall how the Loft made him feel. He answers slowly, enunciating each word dramatically. "Elated. Bliss. Total, utter, complete happiness with music." I then ask him to lay out the ingredients, because lord knows it's time to take a cue from the wise and experienced. "Simplicity. You play the music and you dance, end of story. No liquor, no bouncers, just family – people who know each other just to dance together. You play fantastic music on the best sound system and in an incredible atmosphere. What else do you want?"

François K plays with resident DJ Said, Sat/16, 9 p.m.-2 a.m., Atmosfere, 111 Minna Gallery, 111 Minna, S.F. $20. (415) 289-2294.