DJ Deeon – Induced EP (1995)

Alternative title: Going back to my roots, yeah!

I have a confession to make: While writing my review for DJ Funk’s Pumpin’ Tracks EP I left out something crucial. When I bought it a year ago in Tokyo, I was excited to own it. But I actually wasn’t super excited to listen to it. I bought it more out of a sense of duty than actual musical interest. I know, I know, and I’m sorry.

You see: Funk had just passed, you don’t see his records everyday, and I felt like my “career” as a DJ and producer is built on the back of Chicago legends like him. Our collective Raiders was founded on a shared love for the seminal Dance Mania label, for Detroit ghettotech and electro, for Miami bass and for Baltimore Club. Our parties were known for showcasing those music styles. Funk’s music, and some variation of “Pump It” was played at pretty much every event. I had to own that record. But did I really want to play it?

Around that time, I was playing very different music in my club sets. It was mostly nostalgic happy hardcore, 00s hard house, energetic speed garage, some techno-adjacent trance, and the odd pop edit. I still love all of these styles of music. 

But I also feel like I’m fully back on the sauce when it comes to the OG Chicago business that ignited my passion for fast, freaky and simple house music in the first place.

Reigniting a passion through a mediocre gig

My personal renaissance with the Chicago OGs started around last august when our collective did a takeover for Sensus festival, around 2-3h away from Berlin. This lovely small event by a tightly knit Berliner crew brings together the city’s electronic music nerds, graffiti writers, art school kids, and speed freaks on an abandoned airfield for a real family affair.

Every meter I’d bump into friends, friends of friends, and soon-to-be friends in a way that made me feel at home like few other festivals have done before. I am also proud to call myself a resident of the Sensus these days but that’s another story.

Either way: we took over a woody outdoor floor and invited some lovely friends, namely divas Camilla Rae and Hedda, who played incredible sets. But I was also looking forward to DJ Nortside and myself playing some ghetto house vinyl for the early shift to pay respects to the roots of our collective. That meant dusting off some of the old Dance Manias I hadn’t played in a while. 

Honestly, the 2h set was fun, but it wasn’t stellar – in my memory it only really started catching the crowd once we moved away from our scratched up Chicago records and started playing more eclectic modern club tracks and electro. However, the whole process of preparing for this set and witnessing Nortside’s amazing bleepy selection really got me fired up. I was keen to dig into that music again. And to also go beyond the classic bangers driven by raunchy repetitive vocals that dominated my collection.

Hold up, wait a minute!

Fast forward to me preparing the texts for this blog, and I started writing about the DJ Funk EP (I had some footage from Japan about it after all), I became curious about the label behind it. What else had come out on Cosmic records, that odd UK label with the handwritten label designs, that had hosted some of ghetto house’s biggest stars comparatively early in their careers?

I knew I had another record from the same label, DJ Milton’s “Hittin’ Hard EP”. I had dug it up ages ago while working at one of HHV’s Diggin Days events, and bagged it for free, of course. It’s one of these strong yet bleepy Chicago EPs which due to its lack of catchy vocals it never truly made the gigging rotation. Either way, looking into Cosmic I stumbled over DJ Deeon’s Induced EP, which is the focus of today’s ramble.

The standout track, the one that made me want to actually write about Induced, is “On Da Run” – an incredible song which I have simply out of my head, and it’s been MONTHS. It consists of pretty straightforward drum programming and some delay-heavy vocal jamming, presumably by the man himself. It’s never really in pitch, it seems mostly improvised, and it’s among the best things I’ve ever heard. The whole track has a truly haunting and psychedelic quality to it that I just can’t shake. As simple as it is, it’s one of my favorite discoveries of 2025.

Beyond “On Da Run”, “And I Sexxx” is another highlight. It delivers everything you want from a 1995 Deeon track: Catchy vocals, a simplistic bleepy melody, fat toms, and a fairly long arrangement making it a joy to mix. Tbh it doesn’t stick with me in the same way “On Da Run” does, given that it doesn’t have that vibe of someone chanting in a dense forest at night while you’re running for your life. But at the same time it’s probably much more compatible with most sets.

“The Funk Electric” is a tightly sequenced drum machine workout without any melodies or vocals whatsoever, a real barrage of 909 toms. It honestly doesn’t make an impression on its own, but it probably kills as a tool to transition between two large vocals or melodies. “Sex Part 1”, finally, revolves around some chopped up wobbly synth sounds in different rhythms. It’s short, unfortunately, but if you like the type of ghetto house tracks that sounds like you’re shaking a thin sheet of metal – think time for the percolator – this one feels right at home.

Why is this quartet of tracks one that I keep thinking about, that I keep playing at home and in club settings? I think it has something to do with the label responsible, which we should finally take a look at:

Cosmic ghetto house music

Cosmic Records, which released the Induced EP emerged from the club night called Lost, started by Techno legend Steven Bicknell and “infamous UK promoter” Sheree Rashit. Lost, “one of the longest-running and most respected underground techno nights in the UK” began in 1991 and grew a label extremity in 1993, which has remained active in various intervals until the mid-2010s (cool interview with Bicknell here). 

While mostly a vessel for Bicknell’s own productions, Cosmic and Lost always maintained a strong connection with Chicago and Detroit, and was probably the first notable Euro-label to give a platform to artists from the emerging ghetto house sphere on its “Club Track” sublabel.

After Funk’s Pumpin’ Tracks, the Discogs numbers of which look like those of a successful release, Cosmic saw EPs by Deeon, Milton and even Hip-House-hero-turned-Ghetto-god Tyree Cooper (his T.C.X. is one of the most stunning tracks I never get to play out). For those artists Cosmic is an outlier, given that around that time they mostly released on Dance Mania and occasionally other Chicago-based labels such as Rockin House, Underground Construction or DJ Funk’s own label projects. 

One thing is for certain: these artists leaving the Chicago sphere at the time led to some great music. All of these Cosmic releases are absolutely worth seeking out. I’m projecting here but given that Lost was generally pretty tapped into European Techno, it makes sense to me that the artists would aim to use these releases to put out their more hypnotic and minimalist cuts, while keeping the sample-heavy party starters for Dance Mania et al. Like, I can understand why Deeon would release “On Da Run” with Cosmic as opposed to Dance Mania where it was originally supposed to come out.

Tacking on a dance mania rant as if this isn’t long enough already

If you’re into the Dance Mania sound you also know another reason to seek out these records besides the music simply being great. It’s because they weren’t released by Dance Mania.

Let me put it this way: The more you enjoy the music put out by the label in the 1990s, the more annoyed you get with the often jarring decisions made by the label when it comes to their releases. Chief amongst their offences against DJs who love their music is their obsession with cramming too many tracks on each side of a record, meaning that these often already flimsily mixed and strangely mastered tracks lose the little punch they had to begin with, because there’s four of them on an EP.

The label made countless head-scratching choices and it seems that each nerd has another record that they feel Dance Mania screwed up most – often by fading out the best track you ever heard after 2:50 minutes because they needed to squeeze something else on that record.

Either way: This is of course complaining on a high level. Pretty much anything on that label past ~DM50 is historical. And if you are in the business of crate digging and chasing used 12”, you know that records by few labels are as consistently beaten up as those by DM (even in Japan!).

Dance Mania’s decisions can be frustrating at times, but these records were being played and loved. They lived. But I am simply happy for us DJs but also the musicians that there are labels besides Dance Mania, labels like Cosmic records, that have put out out this incredibly forward-thinking and game-changing music at that time.

RIP DJ Funk. RIP DJ Deeon. RIP Paul Johnson. RIP to everyone whose name isn’t up there. And finally I wanted to say Free DJ Milton but it appears that he is in fact back and released a track called “Let’s Juke” just a few months back! So Euro-promoters, do it like Cosmic did and bring these legends over the Atlantic while it’s still possible.