A prominent artist of Chicago’s 3rd wave of House music, Change Request aka Andrew Emil, is a respected fixture and familiar face in the city's vibrant and diverse music scene. A concert-trained percussionist since age 11, he earned a chair in his native Kansas City Symphony before moving to Chicago in the late '90s to commence a thriving relationship with the city's ever-evolving House music aesthetic.
As a traditional musician, Andrew has worked as a keyboardist, arranger, and orchestrator on recording sessions and productions, cutting his teeth at the former Chicago Trax Recording Studios under House music innovator Vince Lawrence. Credited on over 250+ recordings, Andrew's composition and studio productions range from concert works and sound design to film scoring stages and hundreds of releases of electronic music productions. In recognition of his contributions, he was invited to join the Chicago chapter of The Recording Academy’s New Member Class in 2024.
Andrew's Change Request moniker is the existential summation of his musical range - the sonic embodiment of his chameleon self. It is an avenue for the personal re-working of Soul, Jazz, and beyond – augmented with contemporary danceable and introspective music - a modern vernacular expression of urban stories via subtle, dance-inducing sounds...
K: How long have you been in the music scene?
C: My life in music started at 12. I studied percussion in middle school, and I studied with a teacher. I got a chair in the Kansas City Symphony and played percussion. And in the midst of all that during high school, at the same time (as) playing in the orchestra, I was playing drums in punk rock bands. And, when I did undergrad, I studied music composition and acoustic engineering.
K: What were some of the punk bands you played in - are there any recordings?
C: Area 51, mainly. No, recording time was a bit too expensive in the '90s.
K: Oh OK.
C: I started playing Jazz piano, my primary instrument in high school. The DJing also started around the same time. I began buying records when I was about 16 or 17. That was my first introduction to being involved in electronic music — around '97 — and when I got pretty serious about buying records. I moved to Chicago in the late 90s to do music and to go to school at Columbia College).
During college, I interned for a guy named Vince Lawrence at Slang Music out of Chicago Trax (Recording) on Larrabee and Chicago Avenue. There, they recorded a bunch of Industrial—Ministry, Skinny Puppy, Wax Trax!, the Matrix soundtrack, and more. R. Kelly had a whole second room on that floor, where we worked down the hall.
K: Yeah.
C: I worked late nights there for six years, working for Vince. And he taught me a lot about the business of music and some stuff about recording, too. And so I kind of cut my teeth at Chicago Trax there - learning the business and the art of making records and been making records ever since, and DJ'ing.
K: Wow. That's cool, man. Were you working with Screamin' Rachel while you were over at Trax?
C: No, as Chicago Trax Recording is not the label Chicago Trax, and they are not even affiliated. Chicago Trax Recording was a studio run by a guy named Reid Hyams, and it was mainly a commercial studio. Nice rooms, consoles, and location, but absolutely no affiliation with the label Chicago Trax. It was just a small unmarked building right on the corner of Larrabee and Chicago - back when Cabrini Green was there.
K: That's cool. Do you still collaborate with Vince Lawrence?
C: Yeah, Vince and I have worked together ever since then in certain capacities. He's been making records in the city for a long time and he comes from an interesting legacy. His Dad ran Mitchbal Records, so he grew up in the record business. He was in a band called Z-Factor and he made "the first House record ever" with Jesse Saunders, (On and On). His Dad just passed recently, so condolences again to him and his family.
K: Right. Yeah, condolences for sure, man.
C: Bringing these two stories together — Vince started the label Chicago Trax with Larry Sherman and Jesse. They got cut out of the picture and Larry just took it and kept going. Many years later, Vince sued to get the rights back. He worked to get all the rights back - exactly 40 years later - a sort of reparation of rights for the recording artists.
When I first started working for Vince, I learned how to shop music to A&Rs. I would front-load what I considered the hot stuff or my best work, and then I would give them options — like 10 or 12 songs on a demo instead of just 2 or 3 — because I have a higher chance of them saying, "Hey, I like tracks 4, 5, and 9. Let's do an EP." I learned that trick from Vince back in the day.
“Music is a sacred art that connects our species across lands, languages, time, and space. The magic in the math of music and its residual spirituality are powerful forces of human evolution and wonderment." - Change Request
K: You moved to Chicago when you were 18, right? Where did you move from?
C: Kansas City, Missouri - about 500 miles southwest of here, roughly. I grew up there and got into dance music there. I had big Jazz influences, as Kansas City is a big Jazz city. Around the time I was finishing high school, I felt like I reached the ceiling there and I wanted to be somewhere else.
K: Yeah.
C: A lot of the House music records I was buying at the time were Cajual, Prescription, and artists like Glenn Underground, Chez Damier, Ron Trent, Gemini, Boo (Williams), Jordan Fields, Derrick (Carter), Sneak, etc. Chris Nazuka, that kind of stuff, as I was a traditional musician and I played instruments.
My older brother was into electronic music long before I was; but he was really into Industrial stuff like Front 242, Skinny Puppy, and a lot of Wax Trax! stuff - Lords of Acid, this kind of music. When I first heard this music, it felt mechanical with ridged grid-sequenced drum machines and didn't feel really human to me...
There was a local DJ named Pat Nice in Kansas City who I'd heard play music often, and I loved the records he was playing. I was like, "Wow! This is electronic music, but it sounds like humans made it!" Come to find out, it was on labels like Cajual, Prescription, Balance, and Relief from Chicago, and I developed a strong connection to these records. Those records — all released by Cajual Entertainment, which is Cajmere/Green Velvet's label on Goose Island — are the ones that drew me to the sound of Chicago.
"Keeping an innocent, exploratory, and practical approach to the creative process, along with incrementally expansive expectations, will ensure that the transformative capabilities of this sacred art are leveraged with emotion and meaning.” - Change Request
K: Is Cajual's studio still on Goose Island?
C: It's not. I feel that it should be a landmark though. You can drive by the address, 1229 N. North Branch, but it hasn't been there for many years. Goose Island is an interesting place in the city, I think there's an interesting energy there. A good friend of mine, Howard Bailey, ran an awesome club on Goose Island for a long time called Slick's Lounge, and that was a fun spot for many years, right down the street from Cajual.
Goose Island is quite a fascinating little place in the city. It's an island with only the Chicago River separating it. When you drive over the bridges on Division St. you feel like you're just going over the river and back to land again, but you're on an island.
K: When I first heard the name Change Request, I thought it was like a group and I thought it was you and maybe somebody else. Then over time, I realized it's just you, but can you give me a rundown on Change Request?
C: I moved to Chicago in the late '90s and I started making records. I made House music records for a long time, and I recorded under different names. Mainly as Andrew Emil, but also as After Monday (with Gene Farris), Broadway & Wilson (with Jeff Bloom), and Uptown Tones (with Pat Nice) as I lived in Uptown for many years on the corner of Broadway & Wilson. Pat Nice was my earliest DJ mentor and he also moved to Chicago to live with me for a bit.
Around 2011, I was getting burnt out on making House music, as I felt like I was getting to the point where I said all I had to say. It became a predictable pursuit from an artistic standpoint, and I was bored with making the same record repeatedly.
I started a new musical project to avoid having a predictable output. The idea of the Change Request project was to explore everything from downtempo and mid-tempo to acid music, film music, and more.
I refer to much of the music as "Incidental Dramatic Music". Because you have an incident, a dramatic point is reached, and then it goes away. It could be anything from Ambient to Acid House, mid-tempo dance, and more. There are no boundary restrictions or genre limitations. Change Request is the container and the canvas that I put that stuff into and said, "Change Request is going to be whatever it's going to be. And I have no goals for its commercial success outside of I just want to make whatever I want without attaching my Andrew Emil name to it," which people know as a House producer/artist. And this thing is (actually) a change request, which comes from wanting to change the course of direction for something from a process-oriented place. That name resonated with me because that's really what it was. I also like the idea of something being two words, a slogan, a tag, and a signature that wasn't a name.
Since then, it's been four full-length albums, about 10 EPs, and a bunch of singles. Everything in there from instrumental film music to Downtempo to Lo-Fi Hip-Hop to dance music to Smooth Jazz to Acid House, and anything in between.
The first Change Request project was for my old label four play music, the second was for Seasons Recordings, and the third was with Chez Damier on Glenview Records. After that, I decided to go on this two-year journey where I made a piece of music every day based on whatever inspiration or feeling I had for that day.
And, if I didn't have a particular feeling coming over me for inspired writing, I went back to my college understanding of composition. When you study composition in a conservatory, they teach you how to write music through a process of writing études, or musical puzzles exploring techniques.
Étude is the French word for "study", and every composer who's ever written music in the traditional sense has written a series of études in their life. An étude is a study of particular techniques or skills to be explored or practiced by the player or composer.
I began the Change Request études by using two adjectives, asking things like, "What is red, and ominous sound like? Or, what does purple and romance sound like?" That would be the only goal of writing that piece of music, "Does it meet those two adjectives?" I did that for a couple of years without releasing any of it, and putting the pieces into a silo. After I collected about 180 pieces of music over that period, I asked myself, "What do I want to do with this stuff now?"
I decided that I wanted to approach the idea of making an LP aka making a full-length album. I wrote a story about what this album is about. The first LP under Change Request was an unrequited love story with a Canadian partner. Released in 2019, RiteOnRed is a love story about a long-distance relationship, that eventually comes to an end. The plotline explores joy, infatuation, romance, sadness, reflection, learning, and acceptance. I highlighted that story across the 10 tracks on the RiteOnRed album.
To do this, I needed to plot out in the storyline which emotions to use and where they occurred. I then referred to all these pieces of music I had created, which were based around emotion and color, and I plotted out the emotional arc of the story with the coordinating musical work. That's how the first Change Request album came together. There's a plot behind it that you can feel when you listen to it, but it wasn't written linearly. And that's been my process for making albums thus far.
K: Wow! And you say you made three albums?
C: There are three LPs out now (RiteOnRed, Neural Nocturnes, Theoretical Certainty) a fourth one, All We Have Is Time, is on the way for a label in Lisbon, Portugal (Percebes Música) that will be out next year.
K: Cool. How would you define/describe your concept of "Incidental Dramatic Music"?
C: It’s like a photograph, in many ways. The goal is to create music that significantly defines a space or place, illustrating an emotional fragment captured in time. It preludes, develops into a place of focused musical drama, and then disappears...
K: What do you prefer to DJ? Drum'N'Bass, House, or Techno?
C: I've been doing House music for so long, and I always get booked for House sets, it's a part of my DNA. House music has been in my life since I was 16 years old, but I have such a wide range of music that I love, that I don't get to play out often. When I was growing up DJing, I had weekly residencies at different venues in the city. I'd play for seven to eight hours at a clip, and that would allow me to cover a large breadth of genre and vibe. I believe there's a time and a place for everything, and I love to play as for as long as possible so that I can cover a bunch of musical ground.
When you ask that question, it's a challenging one, because what I like to play and what I get to play often aren't necessarily the same things. What I do love to do is to open up a room over many hours, as I can start with Ambient incidental dramatic music vibes and build it up through Jazz, Downtempo, Disco, and midtempo, and then finish it off with House, Techno, and Drum'n'Bass. I like playing lots of different kinds of moods, tempos, and vibes, but I don't always get the opportunity to do so.
K: You must have been stoked when Alfonz De La Mota invited you to spin Drum'n'Bass at "Bass On The Beach" (event).
C: Yeah! I don't get to play Drum'n'Bass as often as I'd like. Drum'n'Bass has been a part of my life for a long time, and some influences over the years would be artists such as LTJ Bukem, Ed Rush & Optical, DJ Odi, DJ Zinc, Soul Slinger, Goldie, Adam F, DJ DB, Roni Size, DJ Raw, Kemistry & Storm, etc. Another huge inspiration in that world is a dear friend and an American legend in the genre, the one and only Audio Angel aka Rashida Clendening from San Francisco.
A remarkable singer and songwriter, Rashida and I have been writing music together since I was in my early 20s, and she's been featured on all of my Change Request albums. Back in the early 00s, we used to have a band in San Francisco called Sunday Scoundrels, and we released a few EPs and singles together under that name. I am grateful to continue to work with her after all these years, and you should check out her currently active ensemble, Audio Angel & Her Good Intentions.
It was great to share the decks with Fortune for that Bass On The Beach event. She is one of the best DJs in the Midwest and beyond. Originally from the UK, she is a DJ I admire greatly, and the blueprint for the type of DJ I would love to see more of in the electronic music world.
She can play everything from Trap, Grime, Drum 'n' Bass, House, Techno, 2-Step, and UK Garage in an hour and a half. And I'm just like, "Man, I can't cross that much ground". She does it in a way that's really - it's effortless. So I would, like, I could get across all that ground maybe in 4 or 5 hours, but I couldn't do it in 90 minutes. You know, that's a real big deal to be able to pull that off - that amount of ground and that amount of time. I give Fortune a lot of props for that.
K: For some reason, Jeff Mills comes to mind when you talk about her, you know - in his swift changes.
C: Sure. Definitely. I mean, it's like the part of that, too, is that 2 things are important to that is one, you have to be sort of fearless in your ability to say, "I'm going to do this." And then the fearlessness comes in part two, which is you have to have a crowd that's up for it. And then you have to be fearless with the idea that if you don't have a crowd that's up for it, that's just what it's going to be.
You know, you may clear a dance floor, but your fearlessness led you to say, "I'm going to do this because I think this is what I want to do." And so this is kind of part of what DJing - the sort of give and take with DJing - is in general is, you know, DJing always, to me, is a conversation with an audience. So I always show up with a bunch of music I think is going to work that night. And then I let that conversation tell me what to play and how to play it; but, sometimes, like with her, what I was saying with Jessica, it's interesting is that you sort of have to be fearless about like, "hey, I may lose everybody here."
And that conversation we're having, I may stop talking to you and you may walk away until you hear something that you want to come back for. And sometimes there's, like I said, there's a fearlessness to that because no DJ in their right mind would say, "Hey, I'm up for clearing a dance floor." But a strong selector would say, "This is where I want to go with this and I'm going to do this and you're either going to come with me or you're not."
K: Right. Yeah.
C: So I find that to be intriguing, which is why, as I said, I think it's cool to see someone cross that much ground in 90 minutes; because you have to have a crowd that's up for that ride because that's a lot. That's a lot of moods and grooves going through in a short amount of time. And not everybody's up for it, but when you find the right crowd, man, they get really into it.
K: So let's talk about Viva Acid. That's something that you started during the pandemic. Was that a collective brainchild or what?
C: So, Luis Baro is somebody I've known forever. Luis lives in New York, but he's from Chicago. He threw parties and raves here - one of the largest rave promoters Chicago has ever seen back in the '90s called Vibeonauts. And I used to play for Luis pretty often back then, and then he moved to New York and we still stayed in contact and he continued to throw events.
Luis had become a really good music producer and a DJ - excellent music producer - and, like I said, continued to throw events and he came to me and said, "Hey, I wanna do something again, but I want it to be different. What do you think?" And so, me and Bryan Bai-ee, who are also friends, got together - started talking about wanting to do something different.
"What would the different events look like? Well, let's have talks and workshops and sort of this thing" - and so we kind of brainchilded it together. But it was Luis' idea to start to do something different and make it about Acid House, and had the name for it, and then we all worked on it together, and so we started in 2020 - October of that year and it's grown ever since.
K: Cool man. Yeah, I think that was a major step in Chicago reclaiming that Acid House , you know, that London so often tries to claim.
C: I mean part of our goals with this were, you know - that's part of what when he came to us and said, "what does this look like"; and Bryan I started putting ideas together, you know, we wanted to be clear about what our intentions were.
And our intentions were a couple of different things - three really - stood out...and some other things - but it's these three - is we wanted to do something more than just throw a party, because we've done that a bunch of times, hundreds, thousands maybe.
And we wanted to do something that was about reclamation, like you said, not just of Acid House but that, you know, reminding people that this is a Black (and Brown) music from Chicago, and that this is where it started and the here's the reasons why. Not just where it started but, like, here's all the people that were a part of this that you can meet in person, that we are talking to, that are telling their stories in their experience.
And do that on camera so this is documented because we felt like that was part of what was missing was, like, a true sort of documentation of some of the stuff too. And then, third, we wanted to make this as an engagement opportunity for people who are under our age bracket to learn about this stuff and define opportunities and to explore creativity.
So that's kind of what fed into the sort of, talks, topics, conversations, workshops; and then, sort of, how the artists are curated for it was a cross-generational thing that's sort of a handing-off of this stuff to a youth culture from people who are stewards of it, like ourselves, for so many years. And then reminding people that this is a Chicago thing that came from Black communities in Chicago; and it grew from there, you know - grew into it is, but that this is, you know, that's the story.
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