Don't Turn The Lights On Yet (Bassline) is NOVASE15 ft. ROZ BAPTISTE's second mix — harder, faster and considerably more physical, the same refusal rebuilt as a UK club record, 138 BPM, F minor.

Music Track Story

Don't Turn The Lights On Yet (Bassline) is the second mix in NOVASE15 and ROZ BAPTISTE's two-mix debut release — the same song after it crossed the Atlantic. Where the original is warm New Jersey and New York gospel house, this is what that tradition became when it landed in Britain: organ bass stabs, a wobbling sub, skippy garage hats and shuffled snares, an MC riding the intro and the breaks, and a real drop the original never allows itself.

ROZ's vocal stays exactly as warm, raspy and restrained as on the original — the single biggest mistake this mix could make would be toughening her up to match the drums, so it doesn't. She sits on top of a record that's got considerably harder underneath her. It's still the last twenty minutes of the night, same refusal: “You don't know what I been through, all week, all day — this beat the only thing that made me okay.” The breakdown keeps its beat of silence before the final drop — the same gap the original uses to bring the organ in.

The line that makes it more than a party record hasn't changed either — “If this is church — then why we leaving now?” — and the added lines are all about the physical fact of being in the building: the system, the floorboards, the levels, the rewind. The original is about the feeling; this one is about the room the feeling is happening in.

NOVASE15 produces both mixes and bookends this one exactly as she bookends the original — the same flat, unperformed spoken lines opening and closing the record. Seen side by side, the two mixes are one photograph at two temperatures — the same music, twice, on two sides of an ocean. This one draws directly on gospel and on the house tradition it grew out of — living traditions belonging to real people and real rooms. We say plainly that we're visitors in them.