Dancing. The beats searching for bodies to inhabit, brains to rearrange. Let's talk about this darkness in dance music. Not the willful hard gestures found in genres that go through the end stages of a heavy drug phase. No, this is a darkness inherent in the experience of house music: the trance opening to a plane where forces push you into different kinds of euphoria or, in the opposite direction, into different kinds of darkness. . . . the chills down your spine that don't feel correct . . . thoughts whirling without connection . . . things moving at the edge of your vision . . . And then, after the bodily confusion, this emptiness of the soul . . . the city, at once, forced into your consciousness, a shady place in the mind that one can get accustomed to and even grow to like. From the beginning of house music there have been records and producers that wanted to inhabit this place: think 'Acid Trax,' 'Mentasm,' Jeff Mills, and Basic Channel. The grit, the rolling of the 303, the circular drives and echoes creating a tunnel sound, a sound of your mind being pulled into a vastness that is both promising and scary. Indeed, the title of Baby Ford's brilliant new album doesn't so much refer to the 909 drum machine as to this sacred machine into which minds are thrown whilst dancing: a living assemblage of bodies, technology, and music that searches for new pleasures.